Politics of Tunisia Arab Spring. On 14 January 2011, president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali officially resigned after fleeing to Saudi Arabia, ending 23 years in power, following the most dramatic wave of social and political unrest in Tunisia in three decades. Street protests and civil disobedience against high unemployment, food inflation, corruption, a lack of political freedoms like freedom of speech and poor living conditions, were sparked by the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi on 17 December 2010 A Constituent Assembly was elected on 23 October 2011, and a new constitution was adopted on 26 January 2014. It was passed on 10 February
Hillary Clinton's tenure as Secretary of State but she avoided specific issues of U.S. aid and when elections should take place. President Obama was reportedly unhappy with U.S. intelligence agencies following their failure to foresee the 2010–2011 Tunisian uprising and the downfall of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali as well as the Egyptian protests. Responding to criticism that the State Department had failed to see the developments in Egypt coming, Clinton defended the U.S. in an interview on Al-Arabiya, saying "I don't think anybody could have predicted we'd be sitting here talking about the end of the Mubarak presidency at the time that this all started." Reflecting