After the fall of Ben Ali, protests against the economic situation became almost like a ritual at the beginning of a year when the new finance law would come into effect right around the time of 2011 revolution’s anniversary on 14th January. Disappointed expectations for socioeconomic improvement clashed with the reality of persisting grievances and at times even further social cuts. The finance laws of 2018 and 2019, however, were met by particular resistance of a wide array of social actors. These two laws implemented the conditions of the IMF loan, agreed upon in 2016, including subsidy reduction and cuts in public sector employment. Yet, the finance laws were also accompanied by the introduction of new social welfare programs. Furthermore, certain reform measures such as freezing public sector wages had to be taken back given the strong resistance of the Tunisian trade union federation. At first sight, these observations meet the expectation of political science as budget politics in democracies are built on trade-offs (Adolph et al. 2020). Yet, the growing contention in Tunisia over the annual budget seems to indicate that solid trade-offs could not be achieved, pointing to a shrinking common ground between the government and social actors. The paper therefore asks for the impact of these fierce struggles over the budget politics for the political order in Tunisia. It builds on document and media analysis as well as interviews conducted with stakeholders during field research. From a political economy perspective, it situates these conflicts in the specific context that make budget politics in Tunisia different from Western democracies: the process of democratization on the one hand, and the form of neoliberalism promoted by the IMF on the other hand. The paper argues that one crucial question at stake here is the one of agency: Analyzing the preparation, deliberation and implementation phase of the two laws, agency in the budget process is not confined to the IMF as one might argue from a leftist position. Looking at specific topics it becomes clear that domestic actors can have the power to block or water down reforms. The cycles of reform and resistance rather show the complexity of bargaining processes that the textbook macro-stabilization programs of the IMF tend to ignore, thereby fueling societal conflicts and weakening the new political order.

Is there taxation without representation? Egypt has witnessed a recent surge in property tax revenues, albeit from a very low base. This paper wishes to address the revenue side of state finances in Egypt since the adoption of the IMF program in late 2016, with a special focus on property taxes. The bulk of writings on Egypt’s political economy have so far tackled austerity and their adverse social impact on the poor and middle classes. I wish here to trace the shifting relations between the state and property-holding classes (or the rich in lay terms), by studying the design and implementation of property taxes. How could these changes be explained in terms of state institutional capacities to extract resources from society? And to what extent are the regime’s authoritarian dynamics shaping such transformations? Moreover, how could we position such state and regime variables in the current context of crisis-ridden neoliberal globalization? These questions are important to tackle, not just empirically but also theoretically and conceptually linking taxation to state building and authoritarian restitution in a post-revolutionary context. I argue that from a comparative perspective, it seems that regime dynamics are not the principal, not to the mention the sole, factor affecting the capacity of the state to tax societal groups, with an emphasis here on the rich. Long-term state institutional evolution and the political-economic global context (including IFI conditionality, market linkages through trade, investment and debt and ideological hegemony) have been more decisive. For instance, democratization in Latin America did not lead to any significant increases in tax to GDP ratio. Direct taxes on income and property remained significantly lower than the OECD average and closer to not-necessarily democratized parts of the Global South. In the same vein, some authoritarian non-oil MENA countries like Morocco (and to a lesser extent Jordan) have made strides in collecting taxes, including direct ones on property. Focusing on contemporary Egypt, this paper addresses the interaction between the three variables of state, regime and globalized neoliberalism in explaining the occurrence and limitations of the recent transformations in the realm of property taxes. Taxation is dealt with here as a political-economy and political-sociology topic par excellence. This offers a lens through which relations between the state and specific constituencies are reshaped with political implications.

In Egypt, discussions over a new labour law, which should replace the law 12/2003, have started after the 2011 uprising. Yet, they have failed until today to enact this law. While the new trade union law 213/2017 was issued in the 5th of December 2017 after a long negotiation process, the persistent incapacity to promulgate a new labour law proves that a consensus, among the different political and societal actors on that matter, remains hard to achieve. It also reveals that the current regime, in spite of its capacity for massive repression, faces obvious challenges in regard to socio-political reforms. Against this framework, this paper discusses these research questions: How to explain this delay in issuing a new labour law post-2011? How did the reconfiguration of socio-political alliances post-2014 influence the dynamics of these contentious interactions? To what extent do the contentious dynamics over this law reflect the difficulties of neoliberal adaptation on the one hand and authoritarian bargaining on the other hand? To answer these questions, the paper analyses the main points of contention at stake over the different versions of the draft labour law since 2011. It argues that its primary goal was not to provide a new framework for work relations in Egypt. Instead, its aim was to introduce new mechanisms of conflict regulation in order to contain workers’ contentious actions. As the increase of the workers’ protests was spectacular before 2011, the political elites try to manage the workers’ protests by new mechanisms of conflict regulation such as the introduction of labour courts. As the analysis reveals however, they face resistance of private businessmen who reject any measures that would limit their power vis-à-vis their employees. The third major stakeholder, workers, are the weakest part. While some parts of the independent trade union movement were at times involved in the negotiation process, their demands are far from being met. Hence, these mechanisms of conflict regulation might decrease labour protests in short term but will hardly contain workers’ protests in the longer term. The analysis for this research is based on qualitative research methods. It relies on around ten semi-structured interviews with technocrats, labour leaders as well as labour activists. The research also draws on non-participant observation of internal union meetings and labour-related events; and utilizes Arabic-language primary sources such as newspaper articles and pamphlets.