By Ebi Kesiena
The leader of Tunisia’s largest opposition party has been detained by police, marking a sharp increase in the authoritarian crackdown by President Kais Saied.
Rached Ghannouchi, 81-year-old head of the moderate Islamist Nahda, was held after a raid at his home late Monday and taken to prison, according to his party. Nahda was the biggest political group in the north African country for most of the period since the 2011 uprising against dictatorship.
According to the Reuters, three more Nahda officials were also arrested and police took over the party’s headquarters in the capital Tunis. Nahda was banned before 2011, the same year that Ghannouchi returned to Tunisia after more than 20 years in exile.
The arrest of the Ghannouchi, the most high-profile opponent of Saied detained in the crackdown, accelerates a purge of opposition by the president, who has targeted critics who accuse him of carrying out a coup against democracy.
Saied grabbed powers in 2021 and began to overhaul the political system to concentrate authority in his hands. He redrafted the constitution to remove checks and balances on the president and marginalised political parties under rules drawn up for the election of a rubber-stamp parliament.
More than a dozen politicians, judges and journalists have been arrested in a sweep of Saied’s opponents since February. They include Nahda officials, secular politicians and the editor of an independent radio station. Saied has accused them in his speeches of corruption, terrorism and driving up prices to harm the Tunisian people.
TAP, the official Tunisian press agency, said Ghannouchi had been arrested “after the public prosecutor at the Judicial Counter Terrorism Division issued an arrest warrant on incitement charges”. It cited an official source from the interior ministry. Ghannouchi has been summoned for questioning before but this is the first time he has been arrested.
The Nahda leader had said at an opposition meeting on Saturday that “coups should not be celebrated”, adding that “despotism was the greatest sin”. He also said that “Tunisia without Nahda, without political Islam, without the left or any of its components, is a project for civil war”.
Tunisia was seen as the only example of a successful transition to democracy to have emerged from the Arab uprisings of 2011. The transition was widely celebrated because Islamist and secular groups were able to reach a 2014 compromise that allowed the process to remain on track after assassinations and unrest threatened to derail it.
The party, however, has lost a significant number of voters over the years as Tunisians grew disillusioned with a political system that produced a succession of weak coalition governments that failed to address economic problems. The party, seen as a linchpin of the political system, has received most of the blame.
