Tunisia’s Top Opposition Figure Sentenced to a Year in Prison
The international community and Tunisians alike have condemned the sentencing as another authoritarian move by President Kais Saied, but experts predict that the sentencing will result in neither sanctions nor mass unrest
A senior leader of the Tunisian opposition, former Speaker of Parliament Rached Ghannouchi, was sentenced to a year in prison on Monday on charges of supporting terrorism and inciting violence.
Ghannouchi, who leads the Islamic democratic Ennahda party, was arrested last month. He denies the charges. The international community has condemned the arrest as another authoritarian act by Tunisia’s President Kais Saied.
A press statement from the US State Department last month said that the arrest of Ghannouchi and other political opponents represents “a troubling escalation by the Tunisian government against perceived opponents.”
Foreign Minister of Germany Annalena Baerbock told reporters that she was very concerned about Ghannouchi’s arrest and that the “democratic achievements in Tunisia since 2011 must not be lost.”
The Tunisian Revolution of 2010-2011 led Tunisia to become a democracy. In 2021, Saied issued an emergency declaration dismissing the government and suspending the parliament. He ruled by decree for about a year until a new constitution was approved in 2022 that concentrated power in the hands of the president. Saied’s government has become increasingly authoritarian since then.
Alice Gower, director of geopolitics and security at the Azure Strategy advisory firm, told The Media Line that Saied has consistently used arrests of high-ranking politicians to fend off potential threats. Ghannouchi’s sentencing “is yet another example of the repressive nature of the Saied government,” she said.
She noted that the international community’s relative silence on the issue has led to “what has been perceived as tacit indifference to what goes on in Tunis.”
Ghannouchi is popular among the Ennahda party faithful, but his reputation among the population at large is more mixed
Hamish Kinnear, a Middle East and North Africa analyst at the risk intelligence company Verisk Maplecroft, said that Ghannouchi’s prison sentence will spark outrage among supporters of the Ennahda party but is unlikely to inspire significant unrest in the country.
“Ghannouchi is popular among the Ennahda party faithful, but his reputation among the population at large is more mixed,” he told The Media Line.
Kinnear said that Ennahda was part of several post-revolution governments that failed to deliver economic prosperity. The party was also accused of involvement in the assassination of two popular secular politicians in 2013. Although party representatives have consistently denied the accusations, “many leftist Tunisians hold Ennahda responsible,” Kinnear said.
Saied has already isolated international donors and investors due to his erratic policies. The country’s economic woes are now so dire that it needs financial support from elsewhere, despite Saied’s claims to be working to avoid indebtedness.
Similarly, Gower said both Ghannouchi and his party “have faced waning popularity for failure to embrace the younger generation and address the country’s economic plight.”
She said that Ghannouchi’s sentencing will increase the sense of instability in Tunisia, aggravating the country’s economic distress.
“Saied has already isolated international donors and investors due to his erratic policies. The country’s economic woes are now so dire that it needs financial support from elsewhere, despite Saied’s claims to be working to avoid indebtedness,” Gower said.
Although Western governments have expressed alarm at the arrest of Ghannouchi and other opposition figures, Kinnear said that it is unlikely that governments would turn to sanctions or a halt to economic aid, since such measures “would risk undermining Tunisia’s political stability.”
He explained that the Biden Administration is currently lobbying for Tunisia to secure an International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan and sign up for a program of structural reforms that could resuscitate its struggling economy. The work currently being done to stabilize Tunisia makes it unlikely that the US would do anything that might push “the country closer to the economic abyss,” he said.
Gower said that the chaos currently going on in Tunisia is the result of the international community’s ongoing refusal to intervene. She called on the US, a major supplier of aid to Tunisia and central figure in the IMF, to “demand answers and change before authorizing further military aid and the rollout of an IMF loan program.”
