Now Feeling Free, but Still Without Work, Tunisians Look Toward Europe

ZARZIS, Tunisia — The revolution has changed much in this low-slung, whitewashed city on the Mediterranean coast. Residents no longer live in fear of the secret police, and speak openly of politics. Devout Muslims say they feel a new freedom to practice their faith. The red national flags that hang almost everywhere are no longer joined by the portrait of the ousted president, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

But scores of unemployed young men still slouch in the cafes in the afternoons, smoking water pipes, playing cards and sipping coffee. And at night, the fishing boats still ferry thousands of desperate workers across the Mediterranean to Europe.

“If I could swim to Lampedusa, I’d do it,” said Walid Bourwina, 23, referring to the Italian island to which thousands of Tunisians have recently fled. A small red satchel, stretched tight with all his belongings, leaned against his foot.

“I don’t want to spend a minute more here,” he said.

He had come to Zarzis, long a major port of departure for Tunisians leaving for Europe, two weeks earlier from a village farther north. He was waiting — like dozens and dozens of other young men, their faces tired and drawn, wandering this city with their own small bags — to be approached by local people who quietly offer passage to Lampedusa for about $1,450.

Tunisians young and old tell of their pride at felling a dictator and touching off the uprisings that have spread across the Arab world. But the exaltation of mid-January has begun to give way to more sober realities. The revolution has not solved chronic youth unemployment, and the unrest has battered the economy with the flight of tourists and capital. The government is in upheaval, and many also fear it will be years before a pre-revolution culture of mistrust and corruption fades.

“It’s an entire country that needs to be remade,” said Ahmed Faouzi Khenissi, the mayor of Zarzis, a city of 70,000. “It’s not going to be one year, or two years, or three years. It’s going to be an entire generation.”

“If I were their age,” he said of the young men who flee to Europe, “I would have emigrated.”

With the border police suddenly absent after the departure of Mr. Ben Ali on Jan. 14, more than 15,000 Tunisians have left in boats for Europe, according to the United Nations, most setting off from the beaches of Zarzis. In response, Italy’s various regions agreed Tuesday to temporarily share the responsibility of taking in as many as 50,000 migrantsleaving North Africa.

“I don’t want to wait, unemployed, for another year, before things start getting better,” Mr. Bourwina said.

The eldest son of a day laborer, he dropped out of high school because his family could no longer afford to pay for his schooling, he said. He had been out of work for the past year, though earlier he had been a painter in Tunis, the capital, earning 300 dinars each month. It was more than the minimum wage, but far from enough to pay for the home and car he covets, let alone the European lifestyle — discovered through Facebook, he said — to which he aspires, like many Tunisian youths.

For years, the unemployment rate here has hovered near 13 percent, according to official statistics. And in a nation where more than half the population is under 30, youth unemployment is at 30 percent, and even higher among university graduates.

Tunisia’s interim prime minister, Béji Caïd Essebsi, has said that reducing unemployment will very likely prove “arduous,” and would require an improbable economic growth rate of 8 or 9 percent.

“Tunisia is capable of this,” Mr. Essebsi vowed in an interview this month with Le Monde.

It would have been an ambitious goal even for pre-revolutionary Tunisia, where in the past decade annual growth only once exceeded 6 percent, in 2007. And it is a task made harder by the social and political unrest that has continued since mid-January. Planned elections remain several months away, and a number of interim ministers have resigned or been forced out of office. Several people have died in continuing street protests.

The tensions have sapped investor confidence, and agencies have downgraded Tunisia’s credit rating to near junk status.

The country’s economy weathered the global downturn with relative poise — growing 3 percent in 2009 — but it was dealt a harsh blow by the revolution. The upheaval crippled the critical tourism sector, which typically employs 400,000 of the country’s 3.3 million workers and accounts for 7 percent of gross domestic product. Tourism revenues have dropped 40 percent in the months since Mr. Ben Ali’s ouster. (The government has, however, started a promotional campaign with the cheeky tag line, “Finally free to tan.”)

A version of this article appeared in print on March 24, 2011, on page A17 of the New York edition.