‘The War of Liberation’

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Tunisian fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi immolated himself in protest against his country’s uncaring, corrupt government 14 years ago. By doing so, the movement he triggered, the so-called Arab Spring, raised hopes around the world that Tunisia and other countries in the region could embrace democratic and fair rule.

Those hopes were dashed in the succeeding years. Today, they seem like pipe dreams.

These days, in a country long seen as the region’s most progressive, police have been rounding up activists, dissidents and opposition politicians in the run-up to the North African country’s Oct. 6 presidential elections, wrote Amnesty International. Authorities recently, for example, detained 97 members of the opposition group Ennahda, charging them with conspiracy and other terrorism-related crimes.

Such incidents have become commonplace under the presidency of Kais Saied, noted World Politics Review.

Saied has not generated enough jobs to improve his people’s lives, injected dynamism into Tunisia’s stagnant economy, or reduced the country’s sizeable public debt. He hasn’t proposed a strategy or any measures to tackle those problems, either. Instead, he has cracked down on anyone who might point out these failures or seek to unseat him.

He’s sacked around 100 high-level officials, including prime ministers, cabinet ministers and provincial governors, eliminating anyone who has demonstrated a tepid allegiance to his regime.

A former constitutional law professor who won office in a fair election in 2019, Saied has also manipulated Tunisian law to guarantee that he will win the election, added the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His control over the country’s election commission, for example, allowed his cronies to disqualify 14 candidates running against him.

Now he has just two opponents, versus the 26 who ran against him when he won five years ago. One of them, Ayachi Zammel, is serving a six-month sentence in prison for falsifying documents. “It is another unjust ruling and a farce that clearly aims to weaken (Zammel) in the election race,” Zammel’s lawyer told Al Jazeera story.

Meanwhile, just nine days before the election, Tunisian lawmakers stripped the Administrative Court of its power to settle electoral disputes, Reuters reported. The court would have probably ruled against the president in a likely challenge to the election results on the grounds that some candidates were illegally excluded.

Those lawmakers won office in a 2022 election held after Saied dissolved the previous parliament in which only 11 percent of voters took part.

After the dissolution, Saied ruled Tunisia by decree, recounted a European Parliament research briefing. He then proposed a new constitution, which voters approved, that established a new presidential system, giving himself more powers. Now he will assume office once again under the new system he created.

Funny how that worked out, commented OkayAfrica. “In his rhetoric, these radical political changes are serving Tunisia’s ‘war of national liberation,’” it wrote.

But in reality, it’s a “coup d’etat,” say critics like Tunisian civil rights activist Hakim Fekih, a coup that is nearly complete after three years of Saied having ruthlessly “deconstructed the architecture of the democratic regime installed after the 2011 revolution,” wrote the Arab Reform Initiative.

“We are witnessing the capture of the state days before the vote,” Tunisian political activist Chaima Issa told Reuters. “We are at the peak of absurdity and one-man rule.”

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