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Kais Saied, the president of Tunisia, said he banned public gatherings of more than three people and extended the COVID-19 curfew to slow new cases, but his critics have accused him of carrying out a coup and now consolidating power.
Saied, a former law professor who was considered a political outsider, said he fired the country’s prime minister and has suspended parliament to calm unrest in the country and secure its flailing economy. The Islamist Ennahda party, which is the largest in parliament, accused Saied—who has the backing of the military—of staging a coup. The moderate Islamist Nahda party has also made the same accusations.
(Saied ousted Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi on 25 July, the same night that protests erupted in the country over the dire situation many residents face. MiddleEastEye.net reported that Mechichi was “physically assaulted” in the presidential palace before agreeing to resign. The report said he has not been seen in public since.)
The Financial Times reported that Saied has insisted his emergency measures are temporary and denied coup allegations. Saied’s attempt to expand powers amid the coronavirus outbreak is not unheard of on the continent. Ethiopia’s Abiy Ahmed went to war with Tigary for holding a vote during the outbreak.
The paper pointed out that Saied was elected in 2019 and his victory was seen as a reprimand of the established political class in the country. But he has seen little success.
The World Bank said Tunis’ “capacity for economic resilience had been drained by years of indecisive public policy-making and growing protectionism.” The country has performed worse than its peers in the region during the outbreak and its GDP contracted by 8.8 percent in 2020. About 40.8 percent of young people between 15-24 are unemployed. According to the World Bank:
“The percentage of the population described as being ‘vulnerable’ to falling into poverty was expected to have increased as well. Using a threshold of US $5.50 per person per day, the number of poor and vulnerable together is expected to have increased from 16.7% to 20.1% of the country’s total population of about 11.7 million.”
Saied said that he had to take drastic measures to save the country. He pointed to the country’s 2014 constitution that allows the president to act decisively if there is “imminent” danger to the state, the FT said. He called the danger imminent:
“Tunisia has turned from a single party to a single lobby. They divide up the state and its assets as if it was their own private property… and in this pandemic we have reached top position among Arab and African states [COVID-19 mortality]. Is that not an imminent danger?”
The country ended its autocratic rule about a decade ago during the Arab Spring and was the only country to successfully pull off a full democracy. The Economist wrote: “Liberals consider it a beacon of hope: if democracy could flourish in Tunisia, why not in the rest of the Arab world?”
But the magazine pointed out that in the 10 years, there have been 10 governments and all have “failed to curb graft, improve services or create jobs.”
On 2 February, we ran an article titled, “PROTESTS TUNISIA: ‘YOUTH REVOLUTION’ TOP TREND,” and pointed out how the young in the country played a predominant role in demanding change. The protesters say they are concerned that the gains they won during the 2011 Arab Spring uprising could evaporate.
Protests have broken out across the country again.
“Our patience has run out,” Nourredine Selmi, a 28-year-old, out-of-work protester, told Reuters. “There are no solutions for the unemployed. They cannot control the epidemic…They can’t give us vaccines.”
France called on Saied to act quickly to appoint a new prime minister and cabinet. Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser to U.S. President Biden, said Saturday that the country should return to its “democratic path.”
“This will require rapidly forming a new government, led by a capable prime minister to stabilize Tunisia’s economy and confront the COVID-19 pandemic.”
TOP TREND FOR 2021: “YOUTH REVOLUTION”: As we had forecast in December 2020, in 2021, the uprisings and revolutions that were sweeping the world before the COVID War will accelerate dramatically, as billions of people sink deeper into economic despair.
In response, governments will again attempt to use the COVID War as a “legal” justification to prohibit protests. But, as Gerald Celente says, “When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose, they lose it.” And lose it, they will. Thus, we maintain our forecast that protests will escalate into civil wars, and civil wars will spread to regional wars.
Also, as citizens by the millions flee their nations for neighboring safe havens, especially Europe, anti-immigration populist movements will accelerate, with new political parties, some youth-driven, overthrowing establishment parties.