While the world praises the building of a democratic oasis in a chaotic region, educated youth continue to flee the country in search of job opportunities and dignity. Among the few returning are fighters from Syria and Iraq who also found themselves jobless and abandoned by (ISIS) leadership. Returning Tunisian youth and the majority who never left find themselves embroiled in a stalled transition without transitional injustice. Those on the frontlines are increasingly desperate, having struggled peacefully via social movements, protests, sit-ins, and strikes. Following the 2013 transitional justice law, Tunisians submitted more than 60,000 complaints of torture, assassination, and human rights abuses to the Truth and Dignity Commission (French acronym: IVD). The IVD investigated, hosting over 17,000 audition sessions. In 2016, public hearings were broadcast live and attended by activists and politicians, along with youth wounded and family members of those killed during the revolution. No representative of the president or his party or parliamentary allies attended. President Essebsi and other public authorities abstained from attending and deliberately sabotaged the IVD by passing an administrative reconciliation act (formerly known as economic reconciliation), issuing pardons to former President Ben Ali and to emprisoned Nidaa Tounes members, denigrating IVD chairwoman Bensedrine, announcing in October 2018 a suspension of all legislative activities until the IVD was dissolved, and failing to allow the formation of a constitutional court, which could have struck down the law. Based on over three thousand interviews, conversations, and exchanges with victims, protagonists and regular citizens in their native dialect since 2013, in Tunisia and abroad, this paper offers an important contribution to theories of democratic transition. Traditional transitional parameters—such as wealth, social inequality, culture, social capital, scrambled constituencies, education levels, urbanization, natural resources (or lack thereof), foreign intervention, elections, political parties, democracy promotion, and peace theory—have proven woefully unsatisfactory. Disappointing democracy development has had less to do with various structures, policies and rational elite choices and more to do with elite machinations and bad policy decisions (such as the elimination of the IVD) in combination with ever-turbulent popular responses organized along the same structures that produced the revolution. Youth disillusionment continues to erode both political party and regime power, while leaders of the most powerful parties seem willing to trade justice for illusory power in both elections and governance, creating the conditions for efforts to reset the transition.