On Christmas Eve, Abderrazak Zorgui, a thirty-two-year-old television reporter, posted a chilling cell-phone video shot in Kasserine, a city in western Tunisia that dates back to ancient Roman times. “I have decided today to put a revolution in motion,” he said, looking intently into the camera. “In Kasserine, there are people dying of hunger. Why? Are we not humans? We’re people just like you. The unemployed people of Kasserine, the jobless, the ones who have no means of subsistence, the ones who have nothing to eat.” Zorgui, who had short brown hair and wispy hair on his chin, then held up a clear bottle of gasoline. “Here’s the petrol,” he said. “I’m going to set myself on fire in twenty minutes.” His video was live-streamed onto YouTube. In his poignant farewell, Zorgui added, “Whoever wishes to support me will be welcom­e. I am going to protest alone. I am going to set myself on fire, and, if at least one person gets a job thanks to me, I will be satisfied.”

The flames Zorgui lit quickly consumed his body. He died just days away from the eighth anniversary of the Arab Spring, which was started when another young Tunisian set himself on fire, on December 17, 2010, to protest injustice, corruption, and desperate living conditions. It was the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vender who sold citrus fruits off a wooden cart, in Sidi Bouzid, that ignited the epic Arab Spring protests. They spread across two continents; unsettled politics in more than a dozen countries; launched three wars, in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, which still rage today; and ousted four dictators, who, collectively, had held power for more than a hundred and twenty years. Despite burns on ninety per cent of his body, Bouazizi survived for several days. He died on January 4, 2011—eight years ago this Friday. Sidi Bouzid, Bouazizi’s home town, is only forty-five miles from Kasserine, where Zorgui lived—and where he died by the same means.

Zorgui’s self-immolation was “a sign of rejection of a catastrophic situation, regional imbalances, high unemployment among young people and the misery in which our fellow citizens live in the interior regions,” according to Le Quotidien, a Tunisian newspaper. “No one can deny today that all the leaders of this country are responsible, responsible for the distress of our youth, their despair and their frustration.”

In the eight years between the deaths of Bouazizi and Zorgui, at least three hundred others have set themselves on fire and died in Tunisia—political acts to protest the difficulties of life in the country. Another two thousand have tried but survived, Chaima Bouhlel, the former president of Al Bawsala, a local political watchdog group, told NPR on Sunday.

Tunisia, a former French colony, is among the most Westernized Arab countries. Four out of five Tunisians over the age of fifteen are literate. Many are on social media. Rap provided the rhythm for the so-called Jasmine Revolution, in 2011, when the young rapper El Général released an angry anthem that was picked up across the Arab world. At the time, rap was banned in the North African country; a video of the song spread via Facebook.

Tunisia emerged from the Arab uprisings as the most credible democracy among the twenty-two Arab countries. It now has the most enlightened constitution. It has held the fairest Presidential, legislative, and municipal elections, judged by monitors from around the world (including me). In 2015, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Tunisian Quartet—four groups of human-rights activists, lawyers, a national union, and a trade confederation—for their work negotiating among parties and sustaining the fragile democracy. The Quartet “established an alternative, peaceful political process at a time when the country was on the brink of civil war,” the Nobel Committee said. “It was thus instrumental in enabling Tunisia, in the space of a few years, to establish a constitutional system of government guaranteeing fundamental rights for the entire population, irrespective of gender, political conviction, or religious belief.”

But, over the past eight years, successive Tunisian governments have failed to create enough jobs for the educated, to address pressing needs ranging from housing to health services, and to provide for society’s rising expectations. More than a third of young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty-four are unemployed. Zorgui’s death has resonated. It sparked days of protests and clashes with police in several cities, including Tunis, the capital, in the east. A tentative calm settled in over the weekend, but activists have called for further demonstrations to mark the Arab Spring anniversary. More worrisome, the existential challenges that threaten Tunisia’s government show no sign of improving anytime soon.

“The dozens of protests that occurred following Zorgui’s suicide were but a few of the more than eight thousand that have been occurring annually in Tunisia in recent years,” William Lawrence, a North Africa specialist at George Washington University’s Elliott School, told me. He said that Tunisia has had two overlapping revolutions. The first emerged from the working class and in Tunisia’s rural hinterlands. It has largely failed to produce socioeconomic changes. The second, more urban and among the middle and upper classes, succeeded in its goal, despite recent backsliding, to force out a corrupt dictator and the two mafia-esque families presiding over the country.

“The Zorgui self-immolation brought together both sets of revolutionary aspirations, one concerned with professional salaries and freedom of the press, and the other concerned with surviving the miserable conditions of the post-revolutionary stalled economy,” Lawrence said. The problem with the pattern of repeated protests, both small and large, is that the Tunisian government has rushed to enact stopgap palliative treatments. “Tunisia is not dealing with deep structural issues nor with the chief causes of the revolution that have been aggravated in the aftermath of that revolution,” Lawrence said.

The backlash has led thousands of Tunisia’s young to join extremist movements, notably the Al Qaeda branch in North Africa and the Islamic State. “A large number of Tunisian citizens, between three thousand and six thousand depending on the source, have joined the ranks of IS in Iraq, Syria and Libya,” the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, which monitors conflicts, reported in June.

The physical demise of the ISIS caliphate hasn’t ended the threat. “Nearly six hundred are thought to have returned home,” I.C.G. reported. The borders with Algeria and Libya are notoriously porous. In 2015, Tunisia witnessed three terrorist spectaculars—at the historic Bardo Museum, in Tunis, on a Mediterranean seafront tourist resort near Sousse, and on a bus carrying members of the Presidential Guard. Jihadist groups can tap into “significant networks” of autonomous cells, isolated jihadis, or branches of larger movements, I.C.G. reported. “Several sleeper cells, some of which are in contact with al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and IS, reportedly exist throughout the country in both urban and suburban areas,” the report said.

The combination does not augur well for Tunisia’s New Year. “It is easy to predict that Tunisia will continue to have roiling micro-protests,” Lawrence said. “The current wave will not threaten the establishment like 2011, but it is a harbinger of things to come if Tunisia does not improve its socioeconomic situation.”

Zorgui was buried on Tuesday. On Friday, another Tunisian, this time a middle-aged man, set himself on fire—yet another fatality in a country that once had more potential than any other during the Arab world’s painful transition.