TUNIS — Bottled water returned to Tunisian shop shelves at the weekend after a week in which it had largely vanished from them — the latest and most domestic symptom of a summer in which the country's two most basic public services have repeatedly stopped working.

The shortage was not caused by drought. Bottlers told Tunisian outlets that repeated power cuts had interrupted production lines and, in some smaller plants, damaged equipment through voltage swings; the disruption coincided with an international squeeze on PET resin, the plastic used to make preforms, and with a heatwave that pushed demand for bottled water sharply higher. Retailers used the gap to raise prices.

That chain — a failing grid, a stalled factory, an empty shelf, a higher price — is the clearest available illustration of what three weeks of rolling blackouts have done to daily life in Tunisia.

What happened, and why

Since 12 July, the state electricity and gas utility STEG has been running planned rotating outages as temperatures in parts of the country approached 50C. Peak demand has been reported at around 6,000 megawatts against an installed generating capacity closer to 4,600 — a gap the utility bridges by shedding load rather than risking a total system collapse.

Water followed. SONEDE, the national water company, is one of STEG's largest single customers: its pumping and treatment stations run on the same grid. Its management has said publicly that the interruptions residents experience are less "cuts" than an adjustment between available production and demand, constrained by power supply and technical limits — a formulation that has not travelled well with households that went without both taps and lights for more than 24 hours at a stretch.

The costs have been concrete. Protests have taken place in Menzel Abderrahmane in the Bizerte governorate — where demonstrators burned tyres in the town centre — and in Zaghouan, Nabeul, Monastir and Sousse, with roads blocked. The Abderrahmane Mami hospital in Ariana reported an influx of patients in chronic respiratory failure and said it was mobilising all available resources. Hamza Meddeb, a Tunisian academic at the Carnegie Middle East Centre, told Al Jazeera that livestock were dying, restaurants closing and elderly people falling ill.

The fires arrived at the same time. The Directorate General of Forests recorded roughly 4,400 hectares burned between 1 May and 23 July, against 2,705 hectares in the same period last year — a rise of about 63 percent, concentrated in Zaghouan, Béja, Bizerte, Le Kef and Jendouba. Italy sent aerial firefighting assets through the EU civil protection mechanism, Algeria opened direct operational cooperation between civil protection services, and Egypt has offered support without yet specifying what form it would take.

The state's answer

On 22 July, President Kais Saied convened the heads of STEG and SONEDE and several ministers at Carthage Palace, called the prolonged cuts unacceptable and demanded they end immediately. He has since said he is monitoring the situation closely and warned that "the state will act firmly against anyone who tries to aggravate the situation in the country". In parliament, speaker Ibrahim Bouderbala urged citizens not to let anger over water and power escalate, pointing to other countries that had recovered from comparable crises through sound governance.

What has not been produced is a plan. An instruction to stop cutting power does not add generating capacity, and neither the presidency nor the utilities have published a load-shedding schedule, a repair timetable, or an account of how much capacity is out of service and why. One Tunisia-based analyst, speaking anonymously to Al Jazeera for fear of reprisal, put it bluntly: countries know demand rises in summer and plan for it; Tunisia, he said, has neither the money, the investment, nor the plan.

Meddeb noted a second feature of the moment: public anger is being aimed at STEG and SONEDE, sometimes at the government, but rarely at the presidency. That gap is not accidental in a country where, as Human Rights Watch's Tunisia director Salsabil Chellali argues, criticism has been steadily criminalised — most recently in the case of the commentator Heythem El Mekki, sentenced to a year in prison over a three-year-old social media post and now out of the country.

What could actually be done

None of the available fixes are exotic, and most are already on Tunisia's own books.

The immediate one is demand management rather than blackouts: published, predictable outage schedules so hospitals, bottling plants, cold chains and farms can plan; tariff or incentive schemes to shift industrial load away from the evening peak; and emergency efficiency measures in the largest consumers. The hotel sector is a live example — Tunisian professionals have circulated a list of low-cost measures to curb summer electricity overconsumption in hotels, from thermostat floors to occupancy-linked cooling.

The structural one is generation. Tunisia has raised its renewable target to 35 percent of the power mix and launched multi-gigawatt tenders; a 132 MW solar plant at Mahamla, in the Menzel Habib delegation of Gabès, was presented in late July, with 340 million dinars of investment, roughly 302 GWh a year and commissioning targeted for June 2029. That is the right direction and the wrong timescale for August 2026 — which is precisely the point. The capacity missing this summer is capacity that was not commissioned five years ago.

The third is transparency, and it costs nothing. A utility that publishes what is broken, what is being repaired and when power will be off is a utility citizens can plan around. One that does not is left with the president's instruction to stop cutting power, and no way to show whether it is being followed.