The Tunisian parliament, which has been closed since July 25, 2021, reopened for a session for the first time on Monday. President Kais Saied had deposed the MPs and the government in the middle of the corona pandemic and has ruled by decree ever since. The current government of Prime Minister Najla Bouden reports to the 64-year-old lawyer, who wrote the electoral law for the parliamentary elections himself.
It was held in two rounds in December and January, with the election of a second chamber to take place in May. But even the return of the parliamentarians does not mean a restart of the democratic system, which until 2021 had made Tunisia an exception among the countries of the Arab Spring.
Tunisian and international journalists waited in vain to be admitted in front of the parliament building, which was secured with barbed wire. Only state media were allowed to attend the debate of the deputies, most of whom, like Kais Saied, are newcomers to politics. After the first exchange of words, the state broadcaster Watania interrupted the transmission. “I’m struggling with my family to get through the month financially,” says a passer-by, summarizing the opinion of many Tunisians. “As far as I’m concerned, the parliament should have been left closed because the new MPs were elected by a small minority and mostly without an election program.”
The population has lost confidence in the political elite
After eleven governments in ten years, Tunisians have completely lost faith in the political elite. The moderate-Islamist Ennahda movement, which rose to become a people’s party after the revolution, has also fallen massively out of favor in poor areas due to nepotism and its proximity to radical groups. President Saied, who is not considered corrupt, was able to use the political vacuum for himself, partly because many protest voters paid little attention to the details of his ideology, a crude mixture of pan-Arabism, grassroots democracy and autocracy.
But Saied is implementing his 2019 election program word for word. But because he failed to present a reform concept to counteract the economic crisis that has persisted since the Corona pandemic, his poll numbers have recently fallen dramatically. In the parliamentary elections in December and the runoff in January, the turnout was only 11.3 percent.
Insiders report that the visit of Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani gave Kais Saied the idea of using the issue of migration to distract attention from his low level of approval and the risk of social unrest. Like Italy, Tunisia is a victim of illegal migration, Tajani said in January.
At a National Security Council meeting on February 21, Kais Saied invited army and national guard generals and several ministers to the presidential palace to discuss migration. What began as an unspectacular meeting would later severely shake Tunisia’s good reputation on the continent and in the world.
Tunisian media and trade unions had criticized the arrests of several lawyers, judges and politicians in the previous days and brought thousands of demonstrators against Saied onto the streets. The arrest of former Ennahda officials without solid charges even met with sympathy in secular circles. But when Noureddine Boutar, the owner of the private radio station Mosaique FM, disappeared behind bars, criticism from civil society and trade unions became so strong that Saied had to react. At the meeting of the National Security Council, he launched a counterattack.
According to the President, criminal activities and an international conspiracy are behind the phenomenon of illegal migration. The aim of the plan by unknown powers is to change the demographic composition of Tunisia. Tunisian human rights activists would help settle irregular immigrants and erase the country’s Arab and Islamic identity.
Italy’s coast guard rescued 1,600 people fleeing distress at sea over a weekend
Since the speech, many migrants from sub-Saharan Africa have not dared to go onto the streets in Tunis. The police had arrested several thousand people with dark skin on the day of the speech. Those with a residence permit were often only released days later. Neighbors and strangers threw stones at some of the estimated 25,000 migrants. At times, hospitals stopped accepting West African patients. Mali, the Ivory Coast and Guinea then flew several hundred of their nationals back home by airlift.
Saied assured Umaro Sissoco Embaro, President of Guinea, of the safety of Africans living in Tunisia. Embaro heads the West African business association Ecowas and spontaneously traveled to Tunis for a crisis meeting. But by then, many migrants had already made their way from Tunis to the coastal town of Sfax. Last weekend alone, the Italian coast guard rescued 1,600 people from distress at sea. Most of them had started north from the Tunisian coast in fishing boats.