Demonstrations are officially prohibited. But a large part of the opposition maintained its call to demonstrate on Friday January 14, including several left-wing parties and especially the large Islamist-inspired party Ennahda, the main political force in this Tunisia of 12 million inhabitants. And the date owes nothing to chance: January 14 was the flight of President Ben Ali 11 years ago and the beginning of what we would then call “the Arab spring”.
But the main gathering, planned around the main avenue Habib Bourguiba, did not go as the organizers had hoped: riot units blocked all the surrounding streets to prevent access. Nevertheless, a good thousand people despite everything defied the police, to cries of “Down with the Coup”. There were a few skirmishes along the way and water cannon and tear gas fire.
It is a mobilization of modest size, but other demonstrations took place on Friday January 14 in other cities of the country, for example in Gafsa. And this is above all a first: since the President Kais Saied assumed full powers last July, there were sporadic protest rallies. But Ennahda had never officially called for a parade. It is therefore an explicit challenge to the power in place.
It must be said that the authoritarian drift is obvious. At the beginning, Kais Saied presented the profile of a democrat respectful of freedoms and the rule of law: he is a jurist, a specialist in constitutional law. But things therefore changed last summer, at the end of July, when he assumed full powers. He suspended Parliament and now rules by decree. No election is scheduled before next December.
And it goes further: not only are gatherings now prohibited, but since January 13, the curfew is back from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. And the power has the opponents arrested or condemned. Whether they are from the Islamist movement, like Noureddine Bhiri, arrested at the end of December and accused of terrorism, or democrats like former President Moncef Marzouki, a refugee in France but sentenced in absentia to four years in prison for having qualified Kais Saied of “dictator”… Added to this list is the former chairman Chawki Tabib, also arrested, as is the lawyer Abderrazak Kilani, arrested on Friday January 14 according to the Ennahda movement. For the opposition, all this clearly resembles a coup d’etat, a step backwards in Tunisia.
The argument of power is in particular the fight against the pandemic: a classic of authoritarian powers for two years, with the restriction of public freedoms on the grounds that it is necessary to fight the spread of the virus. The fact is that Tunisia is seeing the number of cases rise again sharply, with the arrival of the Omicron variant. And the country has more deaths per inhabitant than France. But the fight against the pandemic hardly justifies the maintenance of the state of emergency and the regime of full powers of the president. This commemoration of the fall of Ben Ali therefore has a bitter taste in Tunisia.