(Tunis) “Down with the coup” on one side, “all with Kais Saied” on the other: hundreds of opponents and supporters of the Tunisian president demonstrated in Tunisia on Friday, amid tensions exacerbated, on the occasion of the 11e anniversary of the 2011 Revolution.
The protests come days after Mr Saied, who assumed full powers on July 25, extended the freeze on Parliament – dominated by the Islamist-inspired Ennahdha party, its pet peeve – for a year to the holding of legislative news on December 17, 2022.
First, he intends to reform, via a referendum, the 2014 Constitution which he considers too unbalanced in favor of Parliament.
A little over a thousand people opposed to Mr. Saied found themselves blocked by police lines at the entrance to the city center, according to AFP. “The people want what you don’t want”, “Down with the coup” or even “the people want to remove the president”, they chanted.
Less than a kilometer away, nearly 200 supporters of the president gathered in front of the Municipal Theater, with the slogans: “the people want to clean up justice” or “the people want to judge the corrupt”.
“10 years of democracy”
In the camp of opponents to the president, Samira, 42, underlines that “the street will settle. We will not give up 10 years of democracy ”. Ibrahim, 50, believes that the economic difficulties “do not justify” Mr. Saied concentrating all the powers.
“We are against the coup d’état and the President’s latest measures,” adds Abdellatif Mekki, former senior executive of Ennahdha.
A sign of growing polarization, the tone is quite different among supporters of the president. For Mouna Akremi, in her thirties, “for 10 years, the Revolution was stolen by the Muslim Brotherhood who hijacked the demands of the people”.
The division between pro and anti-Saied was similar to Sidi Bouzid (center-east), cradle of the 2011 Revolution, where they were more than 600 to participate side by side in the commemorations of the immolation on December 17, 2010 of the traveling seller. Mohammed Bouazizi, kickoff of vast demonstrations and the Arab Spring.
Mr. Saied decided at the beginning of the month to commemorate the Tunisian Revolution on December 17, while the anniversary had until then been celebrated on January 14, the day of the flight of the former dictator Zine el Abidine Ben Ali. For Mr. Saied, this date was not appropriate, because the Revolution remains in his eyes unfinished.
“We did not make a revolution so that Kais Saied monopolizes all the powers, he is not the leader of the revolution”, protested to AFP the activist Lasaad Bouazizi, 53, recalling that the Tunisians have voted to “have a Parliament, proof of democracy”.
“Nothing really concrete”
“He made a kind of coup d’etat, but life is still expensive, unemployment still high and we still live in indifference”, laments Saida Hamdi, a 50-year-old housewife.
For his part, Hamza Hajlaoui, a 36-year-old unemployed man, has lost all hope: “we will not achieve anything in this country. Neither Ennahdha, nor Kais Saied, nor Ghannouchi (the leader of Ennahdha), nor any political party will manage to do something ”. “The only idea that works is to immigrate illegally,” he said, predicting that “the people will divide and it will be worse in the years to come”.
For Youssef Cherif, of the Columbia Global Centers research center, “the majority of the population is disillusioned with the political class”.
The Tunisian presidency released a message from Mr. Saied on Friday addressing his “congratulations to the Tunisian people” on the anniversary of the Revolution, calling for the continuation “of the process within state institutions and via new legislation so that the people recover. his rights to work, to liberty and to national dignity ”.