TUNIS — Prime Minister Sarra Zaâfrani Zenzri chaired a restricted cabinet meeting on Tuesday devoted to the broad orientations of the 2027 finance bill, according to a statement from the Prime Minister's Office relayed by several outlets.

The bill is presented as an instrument of the 2026-2030 development plan and as resting on the bottom-up, participatory approach advocated by President Kaïs Saïed. The government describes it as a break with previous modes of managing public resources, built on the principle of "counting on oneself" to strengthen economic sovereignty.

The stated priorities are wide: preserving the main financial balances; strengthening the social role of the state and entrenching social justice; reforming the health and social security systems; food, water and energy security; reforming and restructuring public enterprises; digital transformation; relaunching public and private investment with balanced regional development and youth employment as stated priorities; and strengthening fiscal equity, including by integrating the informal economy.

Job creation for higher-education graduates, the acceleration of the digital transition and the development of renewable energies were also named.

What "counting on oneself" means in a budget

The phrase is a doctrine of financing before it is a doctrine of spending. A state that relies less on external creditors has to cover its deficit domestically — from taxation, from the banking system, or from the central bank. Each route has a well-understood consequence: taxation is politically costly and hard to widen quickly; heavy domestic borrowing absorbs bank liquidity that would otherwise finance companies; and monetary financing carries inflation risk.

That trade-off is the substance of the doctrine, and it is not resolved by the orientations announced this week. The list of priorities does not indicate which of the three channels will carry the weight in 2027, nor what the deficit target is.

The recurring items

Two of the priorities have appeared in successive finance bills for years: the restructuring of public enterprises, and the integration of the informal economy into the tax base. Their persistence is itself information. Both are hard for the same reason — they impose concentrated, visible costs on identifiable groups in exchange for diffuse gains that arrive later.

Restructuring public companies means confronting employment and pricing questions in firms that carry public service obligations. Bringing informal activity into the tax net means asking people at the margins of the formal economy to register and pay before they see any benefit from doing so. Announcing both is straightforward; sequencing them is where governments in comparable positions have either found their footing or lost it.

The constraints the bill will meet

The macroeconomic backdrop is mixed and largely external. Inflation eased to 5.1 percent in July and the central bank has held its policy rate at 7 percent while it waits for confirmation. Against that, figures published this summer put the trade deficit for the first half of 2026 at 12,569.4 million dinars, a widening of 26 percent year on year, driven mainly by a record energy bill.

That last point connects directly to two of the announced priorities. Energy security and renewable development are not only environmental commitments in the Tunisian case; they are the most direct available lever on the trade deficit, because imported hydrocarbons are its largest single component. A finance bill that funds renewable capacity is acting on the external balance, not just on the climate file.

What comes next, and what to watch

The orientations are not the bill. The text will be drafted over the autumn and submitted to parliament, where the detail — tax rates, the deficit figure, the financing mix, the treatment of subsidies — will become visible for the first time.

Three tests will indicate whether the doctrine translates into policy. Whether the bill sets a numerical target for reducing external debt service rather than an aspiration. Whether the integration of the informal economy comes with an incentive, such as time-limited relief on registration, or only with enforcement. And whether public enterprise restructuring is accompanied by a published timetable, since these reforms have historically been announced in budgets and deferred in practice.