Karim Kouki is so angry he's shaking. "Nothing will ever change," the 32-year-old jobless teacher shouts and then resumes chanting, together with a group of demonstrators outside Tunisia's education ministry: "We want jobs." Since the ouster two months ago of Tunisia's hard-line president of 23 years, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, young people have been liberally exercising their new-found right to demonstrate.
But demonstrations don't put food on the table. The jobless graduates who have been picketing outside the education and adjoining justice ministry these past three weeks are refusing to budge from their goal. Persistence paid off in January's Jasmine Revolution. Ben Ali was forced into exile after a nation-wide campaign of protests.
Today, Kouki's frustration is aimed at the interim government set up to replace Ben Ali's regime. "The people inside (the education ministry) are cowards, blind and corrupt," he charges.
In the nine years since Kouki completed his English studies he has failed to find a permanent teaching job.
Under the old regime competency alone wasn't enough to land a job in the public sector. Candidates also had to be card-carrying members of Ben Ali's now-defunct Rally for a Constitutional Democracy party. More often than not they also had to pay a baksheesh (bribe).
The picketing teachers are outraged that those who played along with the system get to keep their jobs while the honest are kept at bay.
A few metres away, on the fourth-floor of the justice ministry Markus Loening, the German government's commissioner for human rights, is having a coffee with Justice Minister Lazhar Karoui Chebbi.
"Rest assured, we're on the right path," the 83-year-old lawyer tells Loening over the drumming and din of the demonstrators audible from the street below.
Street power has remained a formidable force for change since the revolution.
Tunisia is already on its third interim government, at the demand of demonstrators who had complained bitterly about the presence of members of Ben Ali's regime in the initial line-up.
Justice MinisterChebbi, a former head of the Tunisian Bar Association, is determined not to let the old guard off the hook for past injustices. But he needs proof, not just allegations.
Like the rest of the government he also doesn't want to get hung up on the past at the expense of the future.
The first milestone on the march to democracy comes on July 24, when the first free elections in decades will be held to choose a constituent assembly tasked with drawing up a new constitution.
After that, a new president and parliament will be elected.
"We have to hurry," the minister says.
As Loening leaves the building, he is mobbed by demonstrators, who rush towards him to explain their grievances.
The commissioner for human rights and humanitarian aid does his best to reassure them.
The crimes of the old regime must be cleared up and the files on people kept by the interior ministry must be opened up to public view, he says.
"It's also about a sense of justice," the German official says, drawing a comparison between Tunisia and the former East Germany, where people demanded and eventually won access to their secret police files after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Analysts in Tunisia say the success of the revolution will ultimately depend on whether the "Facebook generation" that toppled Ben Ali can work together with politicians like Karoui Chebbi.
Tarek Cheniti, a 31-year-old blogger, is convinced the transition to democracy will succeed. "I'm sure, there's no way back to dictatorship," the Oxford-educated political scientist says.
While the Islamist movement, which was repressed by Ben Ali, is making fresh inroads into public life, Cheniti doesn't believe the country of 10.6 million, which has a secular constitution, is about to be taken over by radicals.
"Tunisia is a moderate country," he says. "The Islamists want to drag it back into the past. That won't work."
In the meantime, Ben Ali himself is gradually disappearing from view. Gone are the huge posters of him that used to hang on public buildings. And the arterial road leading from the highway to Tunis airport is no longer named after him.
The road now bears the name of Mohammed Bouazizi, the 26-year-old vegetable vendor who ignited the revolution by publicly setting himself alight in protest over the regime.