TUNIS — The Assembly of the Representatives of the People approved a state guarantee covering a 110 million euro loan from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development to the Gafsa Phosphate Company on Tuesday evening, then opened debate on two further guarantees for the Tunisian Chemical Group before adjourning until Wednesday morning.

Bill 49 of 2026 passed by 58 votes in favour, 13 against and nine abstentions, in a session held in the presence of Samir Abdelhafidh, the minister of economy and planning. The EBRD financing comes with a 7 million euro grant attached. According to the text presented to deputies, the money is to buy modern mining equipment, upgrade phosphate transport and install a high-pressure filtration unit for wastewater treatment.

Deputies then began examining bill 50 of 2026, a guarantee for a 70 million dollar murabaha facility from the International Islamic Trade Finance Corporation to the Tunisian Chemical Group, intended to finance imports of the raw materials its plants run on. Bill 51 followed on the same evening: another guarantee, again for the chemical group, covering imports of fertiliser and raw materials. Bills 49 through 52 of 2026 are among the texts parliament has classified as urgent.

What the vote is actually for

The distinction matters and was made in the chamber. These are not new loans from the Tunisian treasury. They are sovereign guarantees: the state pledges its own credit so that two publicly owned companies can borrow from external lenders on terms they could not obtain alone. If CPG or the GCT cannot service the debt, the obligation lands on the budget.

The two companies sit at either end of the same chain. CPG extracts phosphate rock in the Gafsa basin; the GCT converts it into fertiliser and chemical products, much of it for export. Phosphates were once among Tunisia's largest sources of foreign currency. Production has not recovered its pre-2011 level, disrupted by recurring social conflict in the mining basin over hiring, and by ageing equipment — which is precisely what the EBRD loan is meant to replace.

The 22 deputies who voted against or abstained were not a trivial minority on a technical bill. Their objection, on the arguments aired in the chamber, is the recurrence itself: the state has repeatedly underwritten the same two companies without the underlying performance changing, and each guarantee adds to contingent liabilities that do not appear in the headline debt figure but become real the moment a payment is missed.

A parliament in a difficult week

The votes came during a tense stretch between the assembly and the government. On 27 July a plenary session called to question ministers about the electricity cuts convened without the government present. The following day the assembly's speaker, Brahim Bouderbala, barred deputies from filming or photographing plenary sessions on pain of referral to the public prosecutor — a ruling sixteen deputies say has no legal basis — and, on 29 July, extended the restriction to phones in the chamber.

That the same body approved more than 150 million euros in state guarantees inside forty-eight hours, with the economy minister in attendance, is a reminder that its financial function continues even as its oversight function is contested.

What would make the guarantees pay

The case for the EBRD package, as its backers put it, is that this money buys capital equipment rather than covering a deficit: pumps, haulage, a filtration unit. Unlike a trade-finance murabaha, which funds one cycle of imports and must be renewed, capital spending can in principle raise output permanently.

Whether it does depends on things the loan cannot buy. Analysts and mining-basin advocates have long argued that the binding constraint at CPG is not equipment alone but the unresolved dispute over employment and revenue-sharing in Gafsa, which has repeatedly halted production and rail transport regardless of the state of the machinery. The EBRD's own environmental condition — the wastewater filtration unit — points at a second constraint, the pollution burden the industry places on Gabès and the mining region, which is itself a source of the protests.

The measurable test will arrive in the export figures. If phosphate and fertiliser earnings rise over the next two years, the guarantees will have bought foreign currency the country badly needs. If they do not, parliament will be asked to underwrite the same companies again, and the 22 deputies who declined this week will have a stronger case.