Under what conditions does an authoritarian ruler hire or fire ministers? How do autocrats maintain or mismanage ruling coalitions? This paper, based on original statistics and fieldwork gathered in Tunisia, examines this topic, with a focus on Habib Bourguiba’s four presidential administrations between 1957 and 1987. Bourguiba’s crafty manipulation of elite coalitions buttressed his resilience as one of the Arab world’s longest-serving autocrats, and set the stage for contemporary politics including the 2013 caretaker government and the 2014 election aftermath. It also helps to explain the recent resurgence in the political popularity of Bourguiba-era ministers, like President Beji Caid Essebsi and Parliament President Mohamed Ennaceur. These findings are not limited to explaining the resilience of Bourguiba regime, but also inform our understanding of authoritarian coalitions throughout the Middle East and North Africa. This study analyzes the duration of ministers from an originally gathered dataset of 117 minister profiles and durations over a 30-year period. Specifically, we use an event history model to investigate survival rates of the various types of ministers, depending on the minister’s socio-economic background, profession education, and regional origins. This analysis allows us to identify ministers who successfully survived or did not survive coalition purges. We find that ministers with specific educational and career paths—a College Sadiki secondary education, a French university education, and law career— were much more likely to serve longer in higher ministerial posts. Ministers belonging to an elite social class like an aristocratic Tunis-era family and ministers from certain regional origins were not advantaged. Meanwhile, ministers advancing through auxiliary networks in which they interact with elites and form lifelong bonds in school organizations, unions, and other non-elite organizations were found to be longest surviving ministers. Organizational affiliation, in short, was one of the longest predictors of a minister’s survivability in Bourguiba’s coalition. The findings suggest that consistent cooperation and non-exclusive recruitment in several auxiliary networks with diverging and converging political interests such as professional unions and student organizations normalized elite-mass relations, creating ‘honeymoon’ periods between autocratic regime and mass mobilization networks. During these periods, the central social capital network and auxiliary members institutionalized social preferences that overtime have metastasized into a social decision making processes. These processes, such as national dialogue between party elites and unions, continue to resurface in political society in calls for moderation and national dialogue as trumps to elite divisions or mass organization at the grassroots levels.