Mohamed El-Doufani writes:
Tunisian analyst Dr Ali Chokri looks at why President Kais Saied decided in July 2021 to suspend parliament and freeze political activities pending a new constitution, why that constitution – adopted in a low turnout referendum – is so controversial, and the present economic and security situations in Tunisia.
Hello and welcome to Five Minutes to Midnight. My name is Mohamed El-Doufani and our guest in this episode is Tunisian analyst Dr Ali Chokri, who will be discussing the current political situation in his country.
To start, I will outline the issues at stake in the present state of affairs in Tunisia.
Tunisia is one of two states that survived intact the so-called “Arab Spring”— the wave of unrest that swept across parts of North Africa and the Middle East and soon turned into a bloody nightmare. The other survivor, Egypt, returned to a form of the status quo ante thanks to the backlash produced by the Muslim Brotherhood’s push to monopolise power and turn Egypt into an Islamic state. As for the remaining three victims of the nightmare, Yemen became embroiled in an intensified civil war compounded by a brutal Saudi-led invasion, while Syria and Libya fell into an orgy of cannibalism that left them on the brink of extinction.
However, the precarious stability experienced by Tunisia was not to last. The political relaxation that followed the ouster of the regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali saw the return from exile of Islamists, such as Rashid Ghannushi, and the legalisation of his Muslim Brotherhood Ennahda, or Islamic Renaissance, Party, and the resurfacing of local Islamist extremists and terrorists — Salafists of various hues, including Ansar al-Shari’ah and Islamic State group.
Soon Tunisia began to experience a wave of Islamist bigotry and violence, with attacks on alcohol sellers, riots against art exhibitions, an Ennahda-led government reducing women’s rights in a draft constitution that referred to women as “complementary to men”, the assassination of opposition leaders, and terrorist attacks against a museum and a tourist resort.
The situation continued to slide and reached a climax in July 2021, when President Kais Saied dismissed the prime minister and suspended parliament pending a referendum on a new constitution, in response to a series of protests against Ennahda Party, economic hardship, and a historic rise in COVID-19 cases in the country.
https://embeds.audioboom.com/posts/8135350/embed/v4
*Dr Mohamed El-Doufani is an editor, writer, analyst and commentator specialising in the Middle East and North Africa, and Russian and US foreign policies.
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