Taken to unknown location – Opposition leader arrested in Tunisia – News

  • The leader of the opposition party has been arrested in Tunisia.
  • Rached Ghannouchi was taken to an unknown location, his party, the Islamist Ennahda, said.
  • Prosecutors are investigating Ghannouchi for “seditious statements,” police said.

A senior police official said Ghannouchi was summoned for questioning and his home was searched.

With the arrest of Ghannouchi, the wave of arrests of opposition figures in Tunisia has reached a new high. The driving force is President Kais Saied. In 2021 he ousted parliament and replaced the government with ministers he had chosen.

Dozens of opposition figures arrested


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Rached Ghannouchi is considered the most prominent critic of Tunisia’s President Kais Saied. However, he is not alone in his reservations. According to the AP news agency, the Tunisian authorities have arrested more than 20 opposition figures and political figures since the beginning of February.

He also increased the powers of the President, so that now almost all power is in his hands.

Opposition fears autocracy

Opponents of President Kais Saied fear Saied wants to turn North Africa’s last democratic state into an autocracy and roll back the democratic gains of the 2011 Arab Spring revolution that began in Tunisia.

Ghannouchi, 81, was a political prisoner in the 1980s and went into exile in the 1990s. During the revolution in Tunisia in 2011, he returned to his homeland.

Under his leadership, Ennahda moved toward the political center, joining several governing coalitions with secular parties. After the 2019 elections, he became Speaker of Parliament.

His Islamist Ennahda is the country’s largest party.

What are President Saied’s goals?


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Legend:

Keystone(/Mohamed Messara

Rached Ghannouchi is a very unpopular person in Tunisia and is extremely controversial among the population, says Sarah Mersh. “That’s why President Kais Saied is now hoping for more support than with the previous arrests of opposition figures,” says the freelance journalist living in Tunisia. Ghannouchi’s arrest doesn’t really come as a surprise, it was actually expected.

It is still unclear what goals the quasi-autocratic president is pursuing. After all: “Saied’s followers say he wants to clean up the country and take action against corruption and terrorism,” says Mersh. His critics, on the other hand, see the arrests primarily as a diversionary maneuver by Saied: “The economy is on the rocks, the population is doing very badly,” notes Mersh. His critics said that the president wanted to use the arrests to distract attention from domestic political problems.

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