“At least it’s a kinda’, sorta’ democracy,” I said to a Tunisian friend several years ago. “No,” she retorted. “No one dares go to the beach wearing a bathing suit anymore. Women are denigrated. Freedoms are eroding.”

My already diminished enthusiasm for the Arab Spring dimmed further after that conversation. Then, on early this morning, it became official: President Kais Saied fired the Tunisian government and surrounded the parliament with armed soldiers.

And just like that — pfffft — any remaining dreams of an Arab Jeffersonian democracy went vanished. It is a tragedy that will reverberate through the Arab world for years to come.

For a decade, Tunisia — where in December 2010 vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire and ignited a set of revolutions across the Mideast and North Africa — became known as the last bastion of the “Spring.”

Yes, Ennahdha, the country’s largest party, is loosely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, went the received wisdom in the West. It is, though, only mildly Islamist and has vowed to maintain democratic values — including by supporting in 2014 a constitution that guaranteed basic freedoms.

Turns out Tunisians weren’t buying it. Islamist sensibilities crept in, often enforced by Ennahdha officials. The Mediterranean beaches that attracted tourists, the country’s main source of hard cash, emptied out after an ISIS gunman killed 38 people at a Sousse resort in 2015. Even before that, Islamist enforcers barred locals from freely enjoying those beaches as they had enjoyed them in earlier decades.

Political Islam has ruined many dreams of liberty across the region. During the Cold War, Arab regimes adopted tyrannical Soviet politics. When they turned to the West, the rulers were then mostly urged to maintain “stability.” The last decade’s anti-totalitarian street eruptions finally, and for the first time, empowered the long-oppressed Islamists.

In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s birthplace, Mohamed Morsi won an election in 2012 after the Tahrir Square crowd overthrew longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak. The Brotherhood’s rule ended after less than a year. Egyptians abhorred Mr. Morsi’s mismanagement, cruelty, and incompetence.

When the military, led by General Abdel Fatah al Sissi, unceremoniously finally overthrew Mr. Morsi, millions cheered. It might have been an undemocratic military coup, but the chaos and poverty that deepened under Mr. Morsi were untenable. Mr. Sissi remains in power today. His iron rule is clearly despotic, but those who still remember Mr. Morsi’s faux-democracy days prefer that to the Brotherhood.

Tunisia now seems set on a similar trajectory. The head of the Islamist Ennahda party, Rached Ghannouchi, became the most powerful player in Tunis politics after he returned from exile. That followed the 2011 overthrow of the long-time Tunisiam dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Mr. Ghannouchi is now the most vocal critic of President Saied’s maneuver in the wee hours of this morning.

Tunisians are increasingly disenchanted with the country’s downward spiral in recent years. For many of them, Mr. Ghannouchi and his party are the main culprits.

The president’s army-backed sacking of the government, and his threat to bring Ennahda officials to trial, put the kibosh in any democratic aspirations, but the move may well prove popular among a majority of Tunisians that are sick and tired of being sick and poor.

Additionally, as my friend observed years ago, a country that for decades has been one of the Arab world’s most secular societies is increasingly unconvinced by Ennahda, and millions fear Mr. Ghannouchi’s Islamist allies, including Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Mr. Erdogan has turned away from the secular tenets that guided the Turkish republic since Kemal Ataturk sought to cure the ills of the Ottoman Empire era in the aftermath of WWI. Kemalist Turkey never was an ideal democracy, but it now suffers from all the problems that plague the rest of the region, plus, the increasingly muscular enforcement of religious edicts.

In places like Khomeinist Iran, democracy has always been the facade and Islamism the reality. Hailed by some (including, for a while, President Obama) as a model Islamist democracy, Turkey has now proved that political Islam and liberty can’t coexist.

This is the context in which Tunisia’s experiment with an idealistic, more moderate Islamist-led democracy seems to have failed. Other governing models in the Middle East, including, notably, the monarchies, are proving slightly more durable, but beware of hailing them as ideal.

Over the weekend the Hashemite king, Abdullah II, of Jordan waxed poetically on CNN about the pitfalls of democracy in neighboring Israel. Western pundits love such lectures from Arab moderates that, like Abdullah, are also allies of America.

So far, though, no Arab model was showed that it could lead to the prosperity, efficiency, personal liberties, and freedom of worship that citizens of Western-style democracies enjoy. The Arabs still await their spring.

Twitter @bennyavni