Street clashes yesterday erupted outside Tunisia’s army-barricaded parliament, a day after Tunisian President Kais Saied ousted the prime minister and suspended the legislature, plunging the young democracy into a constitutional crisis.
Saied sacked Hichem Mechichi and ordered parliament closed for 30 days, a move the biggest political party Ennahdha decried as a “coup,” following a day of angry street protests against the government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Soldiers early yesterday blockaded the assembly in Tunis while, outside, the president’s supporters hurled stones and insults at backers of Islamist-inspired Ennahdha, whose leader staged a sit-in to protest being barred entry to the complex.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Saied’s dramatic move — a decade on from Tunisia’s 2011 revolution, often held up as the Arab Spring’s sole success story — comes even though the constitution enshrines a parliamentary democracy and largely limits presidential powers to security and diplomacy.
It “is a coup d’etat against the revolution and against the constitution,” Ennahda, which was the biggest party in Tunisia’s fractious ruling coalition, said in a Facebook post, warning that its members “will defend the revolution.”
The crisis follows prolonged deadlock between the president, the prime minister and Ennahda chief Rached Ghannouchi, which has crippled the pandemic response as deaths have surged to one of the world’s highest per capita rates.
“I have taken the necessary decisions to save Tunisia, the state and the Tunisian people,” Saied said in a statement on Sunday, a day that had seen COVID-19 street protests flare in multiple cities.
The president’s announcement sparked jubilant rallies by many thousands of his supporters who flooded the streets of the capital late on Sunday to celebrate and wave the national flag, as car horns sounded through the night and fireworks lit up the sky.
However, the shock move was criticized abroad. The Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs said it was “deeply concerned” and called for “democratic legitimacy” to be restored.
A spokeswoman for the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Maria Adebahr, told reporters that Berlin hoped Tunisia would return “as soon as possible to constitutional order.”
Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov, in brief comments, said Russia was monitoring developments in Tunisia.
“We hope that nothing will threaten the stability and security of the people of that country,” he told reporters at a daily phone briefing.
Before Saied’s announcement, thousands had marched in several cities protesting against Ennahda, criticizing the lead party in Tunisia’s government for failures in tackling the pandemic.
A senior Ennahda official, speaking on condition of anonymity, alleged that the protests before Saied’s announcement, and the subsequent celebrations, had all been choreographed by the president.
“We are also capable of organizing large demonstrations to show the number of Tunisians who are opposed to these decisions,” this official said.
Since Saied was elected in 2019, he has been locked in a showdown with Mechichi and Ghannouchi, who is also house speaker. The rivalry has blocked ministerial appointments and diverted resources from tackling Tunisia’s many economic and social problems.
‘CHARM OFFENSIVE’: Beijing has been sending senior Chinese officials to Okinawa as part of efforts to influence public opinion against the US, the ‘Telegraph’ reported Beijing is believed to be sowing divisions in Japan’s Okinawa Prefecture to better facilitate an invasion of Taiwan, British newspaper the Telegraph reported on Saturday. Less than 750km from Taiwan, Okinawa hosts nearly 30,000 US troops who would likely “play a pivotal role should Beijing order the invasion of Taiwan,” it wrote. To prevent US intervention in an invasion, China is carrying out a “silent invasion” of Okinawa by stoking the flames of discontent among locals toward the US presence in the prefecture, it said. Beijing is also allegedly funding separatists in the region, including Chosuke Yara, the head of the Ryukyu Independence
UNITED: The premier said Trump’s tariff comments provided a great opportunity for the private and public sectors to come together to maintain the nation’s chip advantage The government is considering ways to assist the nation’s semiconductor industry or hosting collaborative projects with the private sector after US President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on chips exported to the US, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said yesterday. Trump on Monday told Republican members of the US Congress about plans to impose sweeping tariffs on semiconductors, steel, aluminum, copper and pharmaceuticals “in the very near future.” “It’s time for the United States to return to the system that made us richer and more powerful than ever before,” Trump said at the Republican Issues Conference in Miami, Florida. “They
GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY: Taiwan must capitalize on the shock waves DeepSeek has sent through US markets to show it is a tech partner of Washington, a researcher said China’s reported breakthrough in artificial intelligence (AI) would prompt the US to seek a stronger alliance with Taiwan and Japan to secure its technological superiority, a Taiwanese researcher said yesterday. The launch of low-cost AI model DeepSeek (深度求索) on Monday sent US tech stocks tumbling, with chipmaker Nvidia Corp losing 16 percent of its value and the NASDAQ falling 612.46 points, or 3.07 percent, to close at 19,341.84 points. On the same day, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Sector index dropped 488.7 points, or 9.15 percent, to close at 4,853.24 points. The launch of the Chinese chatbot proves that a competitor can
‘VERY SHALLOW’: The center of Saturday’s quake in Tainan’s Dongshan District hit at a depth of 7.7km, while yesterday’s in Nansai was at a depth of 8.1km, the CWA said Two magnitude 5.7 earthquakes that struck on Saturday night and yesterday morning were aftershocks triggered by a magnitude 6.4 quake on Tuesday last week, a seismologist said, adding that the epicenters of the aftershocks are moving westward. Saturday and yesterday’s earthquakes occurred as people were preparing for the Lunar New Year holiday this week. As of 10am yesterday, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) recorded 110 aftershocks from last week’s main earthquake, including six magnitude 5 to 6 quakes and 32 magnitude 4 to 5 tremors. Seventy-one of the earthquakes were smaller than magnitude 4. Thirty-one of the aftershocks were felt nationwide, while 79
RSS