He has still not addressed a word to the Tunisians, but his family history and his Facebook account – since deleted – speak for him. Retired from the Tunisian Central Bank (BCT) and unknown to the general public, Ahmed Hachani, 66, was appointed to the post of Prime Minister by Tunisian President Kaïs Saïed on the night of Monday 1er to Tuesday, August 2. He replaces Najla Bouden, in office for nearly two years, dismissed from her post on 1er August by a terse press release from the Presidency of the Republic.
Two years after assuming full powers on July 25, 2021 – the day of the Republic Day proclaimed in 1957 – for “correct the process” engaged since the revolution, Kaïs Saïed chose a fervent defender of the beylical monarchy (system of dynastic power inherited from the Ottoman Empire) to occupy the post of Prime Minister, one day before the commemoration of the 120e birthday of Habib Bourguiba, first president of the Tunisian Republic.
The two men have points in common: Ahmed Hachani and Kaïs Saïed are of the same generation and both are lawyers by training. But the weight of the family history of the new tenant of the Kasbah – whose father was sentenced to death and executed for an attempted coup against Habib Bourguiba carried out at the end of 1962 – is certainly not unrelated to his appointment by a president who does not mind rewriting history.
Ali III Bey’s great-grandson
“Imagine a Tunisia that would not have given birth to this deceitful Bourguiba”, “even Franco had known that the outcome could only be a royalist parliamentary regime. (…) Wake up Tunisians. The beylical monarchy is our only salvation”… On his Facebook account deleted the day after his appointment, Ahmed Hachani clearly expressed – at least until 2019 – his rejection of the republican regime and his aversion to the country’s first president.
Born on October 4, 1956, a few months after the proclamation of independence but still under the beylical regime, the new prime minister did not hide his pride in being himself the great-grandson of Ali III Bey, who reigned under the French protectorate, until the dawn of the XXe century.
Ahmed Hachani was not even a year old when the Constituent Assembly proclaimed the Republic on July 25, 1957 and elected Habib Bourguiba as its head, after a campaign hostile to the monarchy orchestrated in the press by the Neo-Destour, the ruling party. . “The Husseinite dynasty, of Turkish origin, has reigned over Tunisia for two and a half centuries. It has had time to wither and it is a dead tree that the Tunisian people and their leaders will uproot,” wrote the newspaper The action two days earlier. Lamine Bey, the last monarch of Tunisia, was then deposed and ordered to leave his palace without delay. His property and that of his family seized. He is under house arrest and ends his days in a cramped apartment in the capital.
A few years later, in 1962, Ahmed Hachani’s father, Salah, joined a group of former resistance fighters and officers to prepare a coup against Bourguiba. The faction, led among others by Lazhar Chraïti, a Tunisian nationalist fighter, did not digest the heavy defeat suffered by the Tunisian army against the French soldiers still present during the battle of Bizerte in July 1961. The grievance is added to the authoritarian turn taken by the “supreme fighter”which has distanced – and liquidated – its former comrades in struggle since its accession to power.
A career at the Central Bank of Tunisia
Salah Hachani, grandson of Ali III Bey and lieutenant of the beylical guard until the establishment of the Republic in 1957, had first participated in the creation of the Republican Tunisian army on behalf of its new president. . But very quickly, he was removed from the palace, sent to the Congo – then under Belgian occupation – then appointed commander of the garrison of Gafsa, in the south of the country. Ahmed Hachani and his six brothers and sisters then lived with their mother, Thérèse Le Gall, a Frenchwoman of Breton origin, in Tunis. According to the testimony of one of his brothers, Hédi Hachani, their father was often absent.
In December 1962, the family’s life changed when Lazhar Chraïti’s group was denounced and arrested for plotting against state security. After a hasty trial, Ahmed Hachani’s father and nine of his co-defendants were executed on January 24, 1963. In an interview with West France in 2012, the older brother of the current Tunisian Prime Minister tells how he learned “over the radio that his father had just been executed at 5 a.m.”. According to this testimony, the whole family was driven out of their villa while the children were mocked by their teachers who called them “sons of plotters”. Thérèse Le Gall then manages to find work and support her children, despite many difficulties.
After the revolution, the Hachani family – like several families convicted in the 1962 conspiracy case – filed a case with the Truth and Dignity Commission (IVG) in charge of the transitional justice process, in order to obtain reparations and justice for their father, more than fifty years after his execution. In January 2013, the Ministry of Defense, on the instructions of the then Head of State, Moncef Marzouki, finally handed over what remained of Salah Hachani’s body to his family. His burial in the Martyrs Cemetery, near Tunis, was however refused, Commander Hachani and his companions still being considered putschists.
According to his official biography published by the Tunisian news agency TAP, Ahmed Hachani spent his entire career at the Central Bank of Tunisia until his retirement in 2017. Since then, he has expressed his political positions on his Facebook account personal at least until 2019. If his belated support for Kaïs Saïed that year was not yet quite complete, he expressed in turn his aversion to Bourguiba’s legacy, THE “ultrafeminists” who would have a “blue fear of Kaïs Saïed” or even on the “Islamist danger”while dreaming of a Tunisia where the beylical monarchy would still be alive.