2023-04-20 12:51:54
The leader of the Islamo-conservative Ennahdha party, Rached Ghannouchi, the main opponent of President Kaïs Saïed in Tunisia, has been placed under a warrant of arrest, his party announced on Thursday, denouncing an “unjust imprisonment”.
He was arrested on Monday evening on the basis of statements in which he said that Tunisia would be threatened with a “civil war” if the left-wing parties or those from political Islam like Ennahdha were eliminated there.
According to lawyer Mokhtar Jemai, who spoke on private radio, an investigating judge decided to issue a warrant to imprison the 81-year-old Islamist leader after an interrogation of more than nine hours.
The National Salvation Front (FSN), an opposition coalition of which Ennahdha is a member, confirmed that the judge invoked in particular the motive of “conspiracy against state security” to imprison Rached Ghannouchi. The FSN denounced “a collapse of freedoms in the country”, stressing that Rached Ghannouchi had only expressed “an opinion in a seminar organized by the FSN”. For the FSN, the government “ended up criminalizing freedom of expression and peaceful political activity, proof of its failure to prepare a serious legal case”.
In a statement, Ennahdha rejected any intention of Rached Ghannouchi to call for civil war, saying “strongly condemn an unjust decision which aims to cover up the total failure of power to improve the economic conditions of citizens”. The opposition party described Rached Ghannouchi as “a national symbol who spent most of his life resisting dictatorship through peaceful struggle”.
“Disturbing Escalation”
Rached Ghannouchi is the most prominent opponent to be arrested since the coup by President Kaïs Saïed who seized full power in July 2021. According to the media, five senior Ennahdha officials arrested at the same time as him were released.
The United States denounced Wednesday evening “a worrying escalation” in Tunisia, after the imprisonment of about twenty opponents as well as personalities including businessmen and the director of the most listened to radio station in the country, Radio Mosaic, since early February.
The European Union had expressed its great “concern” on Tuesday after the placement in police custody of Rached Ghannouchi, recalling the importance of the “fundamental principle of political pluralism”. France, for its part, noted that this arrest “is part of a worrying wave of arrests”, recalling its “attachment to freedom of expression and respect for the rule of law”.
Faced with a financial crisis
For the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, these criticisms “can only affect the intense efforts of the country to redress an economic and financial situation under great strain due, in large part, to the bad governance and amateurism that characterized the decade elapsed”, during which the party of Rached Ghannouchi was the kingmaker of almost all government coalitions.
In its press release, Ennahdha criticized “the inability of the government to deal with a suffocating financial crisis in a context of unprecedented price increases in this period of Ramadan”. In addition to the political crisis triggered by Kaïs Saïed’s coup, Tunisians are seeing their economic conditions deteriorate due to galloping inflation, above 10% over one year.
To replenish the coffers of a highly indebted state (about 80% of GDP), the government has been negotiating for months a credit of nearly 2 billion dollars from the International Monetary Fund, likely to release other foreign aid.
In early April, President Kaïs Saïed said he rejected the “dictates” of the Fund, which made the granting of this new loan conditional on a series of economic reforms, including the restructuring of public companies and the lifting of state subsidies on certain products of base.
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