Street clashes yesterday erupted outside Tunisia’s army-barricaded parliament, a day after Tunisian President Kais Saied ousted the prime minister and suspended the legislature, plunging the young democracy into a constitutional crisis.
Saied sacked Hichem Mechichi and ordered parliament closed for 30 days, a move the biggest political party Ennahdha decried as a “coup,” following a day of angry street protests against the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Soldiers early yesterday blockaded the assembly in Tunis while, outside, the president’s supporters hurled stones and insults at backers of Islamist-inspired Ennahdha, whose leader staged a sit-in to protest being barred entry to the complex.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Saied’s dramatic move — a decade on from Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, often held up as the Arab Spring’s sole success story — comes even though the constitution enshrines a parliamentary democracy and largely limits presidential powers to security and diplomacy.
It “is a coup d’etat against the revolution and against the constitution,” Ennahda, which was the biggest party in Tunisia’s fractious ruling coalition, said in a Facebook post, warning that its members “will defend the revolution.”
The crisis follows prolonged deadlock between the president, the prime minister and Ennahda chief Rached Ghannouchi, which has crippled the pandemic response as deaths have surged to one of the world’s highest per capita rates.
“I have taken the necessary decisions to save Tunisia, the state and the Tunisian people,” Saied said in a statement on Sunday, a day that had seen COVID-19 street protests flare in multiple cities.
The president’s announcement sparked jubilant rallies by many thousands of his supporters who flooded the streets of the capital late on Sunday to celebrate and wave the national flag, as car horns sounded through the night and fireworks lit up the sky.
However, the shock move was criticized abroad. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was “deeply concerned” and called for “democratic legitimacy” to be restored.
A spokeswoman for the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Adebahr, told reporters that Berlin hoped Tunisia would return “as soon as possible to constitutional order.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, in brief comments, said Russia was monitoring developments in Tunisia.
“We hope that nothing will threaten the stability and security of the people of that country,” he told reporters at a daily phone briefing.
Before Saied’s announcement, thousands had marched in several cities protesting against Ennahda, criticizing the lead party in Tunisia’s government for failures in tackling the pandemic.
A senior Ennahda official, speaking on condition of anonymity, alleged that the protests before Saied’s announcement, and the subsequent celebrations, had all been choreographed by the president.
“We are also capable of organizing large demonstrations to show the number of Tunisians who are opposed to these decisions,” this official said.
Since Saied was elected in 2019, he has been locked in a showdown with Mechichi and Ghannouchi, who is also house speaker. The rivalry has blocked ministerial appointments and diverted resources from tackling Tunisia’s many economic and social problems.
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