Tunisian authorities have launched a widescale crackdown against opposition figures and critics of increasingly authoritarian president Kais Saied, who has ruled by decree since suspending parliament in 2021.
Noureddine Bhiri, a former justice minister and senior leader of Nahda, the moderate Islamist party that was the largest in the dissolved assembly, was arrested on Monday night. Nahda said in a statement that it condemned Bhiri’s “kidnapping”.
Noureddine Boutar, a secular critic of Saied who heads the independent Mosaique FM, a leading radio station, was also detained.
The men were seized in a wave of arrests since the weekend. Others held include at least two judges, according to news reports, as well as Kamel Eltaief, a politically influential construction magnate, and Khayem Turki, founder of an economic think-tank who was once mooted as a potential prime minister by Nahda and two secular parties.
“This is a dramatic escalation and part of the steady march towards greater repression since Saied’s coup,” said Monica Marks, Tunisia specialist and professor at New York University in Abu Dhabi.
“We are firmly in the realm of extrajudicial abductions happening outside the rule of law . . . There doesn’t seem to be any unifying principle behind the arrests. They span the political spectrum from secularists to Islamists,” she added.
Until Saied’s power grab in July 2021, Tunisia was seen as the only democracy to have emerged from the Arab uprisings of 2011.
A political novice with no party affiliation Saied, who is a former professor of constitutional law, was elected president by a landslide in 2019 in what analysts saw as a rebuke to a fractious political class that had failed to address the country’s economic challenges.
However, Saied has set about redesigning the political system to give the president sweeping powers. A new charter shaped by Saied was adopted in a referendum last July on a 30 per cent turnout. It reduced the powers of parliament and gave the president extensive authority over the government and judiciary.
The latest crackdown comes two weeks after the second round of parliamentary elections held under the new constitution, in which turnout was just 11.4 per cent — only slightly higher than the record low of 8.8 per cent in the first round. Saied blamed the low participation on voters’ distrust of the institution of parliament.
The country’s economic woes have deepened under Saied, who has blamed them on corruption. Inflation averaged 8.3 per cent in 2022 and rating agency Fitch expects it to average 9.5 per cent this year. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent the price of imports soaring, leading to shortages of basic goods such as sugar and flour.
Tunisia reached a preliminary agreement with the IMF on a $1.9bn loan last October, but the lender’s board has postponed signing off on the agreement pending implementation of reforms.
Analysts say Saied’s popularity has fallen since 2021 when many Tunisians welcomed his power grab in the hope it would help solve the country’s economic problems. But so far, opposition attempts to rally a mass movement against his rule have failed.
Tunisians were “quiescent” said Marks. “They are tired. It is less that they still think he might change things for the better and more that they don’t know where else to throw their chips. There is a crisis of hope in the country.”
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