TUNIS — Nearly 12 years ago, Tunisians fed up with corruption, repression and a lack of opportunity poured into the streets and toppled a dictator, chanting for bread, freedom and dignity. Those chants soon echoed across the Middle East in a chain of Arab Spring uprisings, kindling hopes that democracy could bloom in Tunisia and beyond.

Six years later, Tunisia’s freely elected government granted an amnesty to corrupt former officials who had looted the country before the 2011 revolution. To those who had battled for change, as well as those who had never gotten justice for the former regime’s crimes, the 2017 amnesty came as a slap.

“I felt like, how can you expect me to look my mother-in-law in the eye?” said Sayida Ounissi, a former minister in one of Tunisia’s post-revolution governments whose father-in-law had been tortured under the deposed dictator, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.

“You’re actually pardoning people without trials?” she said, recalling the amnesty. “Their victims are still around.”

As the revolts withered over the past decade and authoritarian leaders across the region regained their grip on power, Tunisia remained the Arab Spring’s greatest hope for democratic change — until now, that is.

Disillusioned with the failure of their elected political leaders to make good on the revolution’s promises, Tunisian voted overwhelmingly for an inexperienced outsider for president in 2019. Two years later, in 2021, that president, Kais Saied, swept aside Parliament and most other checks on his power to establish one-man rule.

Though swift, Mr. Saied’s dismantling of Tunisia’s hard-won democratic gains was years in the making. In interviews with veterans of this democracy-building experiment, they pinpointed a series of missteps that erased Tunisians’ faith in the system.