Tunisian President Kais Saied announced on Wednesday (30) the dissolution of Parliament. The decision was released in a video and becomes the new chapter in a series of anti-democratic acts that have been putting in check important advances in the country’s democracy since the Arab Spring.
Last July, Saied had already suspended Parliament and, in December, the national Constitution. He currently governs by decree.
Earlier on Wednesday, lawmakers met online and voted against a series of autocratic decisions by the president, in the first major act of resistance to him since the legislature’s powers were annulled.
Of the 217 members of Parliament, 124 were present at the meeting and 116 of them disapproved of the “exceptional measures” decreed by Saied in recent months.
It was then that the president, after the session, announced the dissolution of the Legislature and opened an investigation against the politicians present.
“We need to protect the state from division. We will not allow abusers to continue to attack the state,” Saied said in the video.
When he suspended Parliament, he also removed Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi and assumed full powers in the country – the local regime is a mixed parliamentary system, in which the president has diplomatic and military functions, and the head of government is in the hands of the prime minister. .
The opposition has since accused Saied of a coup.
The suspension of the Constitution, approved in 2014, followed, under the justification that it was the document that caused the long political crisis that the country faces – and that this Wednesday it deepens even more.
Saied, Ennahda leader and Legislative chairman Rashed Ghannouchi, and Mechichi have been in constant conflict for months, which has also paralyzed the government amid the pandemic.
To repress acts against the government, the president has even called in the military. Exasperated with the political class, many Tunisians, on the other hand, enthusiastically welcomed Saied’s rulings in the hope that he would take strong action against corruption and impunity.
The president was elected in 2019 as an outsider of the political system, with an anti-corruption speech. Although he enjoys some domestic popularity, his measures worry the international community, fearing a return to the authoritarianism of a decade ago – questioned by the Arab Spring, a series of protests that shook North Africa and the Middle East from the end of 2010.
The so-called “anti-corruption purge” launched by Saied after the July measures raised fears of a decline in freedoms in Tunisia. Politicians, businessmen, judges and deputies were the target of detentions, travel bans and house arrests without justification by decision of the Ministry of the Interior, human rights defenders denounced.
Political parties were among the most affected, especially Ennahda, which was already weakened. Leader Ghannouchi has decided to terminate the functions of all members and form a new board “to respond to the demands of the current period with the necessary efficiency”, the legend said in an August statement.
In the midst of the most serious political crisis of the last decade, the country also has to deal with constant economic problems – last year, the economy contracted by 8%. Cradle of the Arab Spring, Tunisia was considered the most successful example of those revolutions.
On the occasion, the protesters managed to remove the then dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali from power and change the country’s political system, with a new Constitution that established the division of Powers between the president, the prime minister and the Parliament.
