TUNIS —
Thousands of Tunisians demonstrated Saturday in the capital Tunis, denouncing a
power grab by President
Kais Saied and demanding accountability for the
country’s long-running economic crisis, AFP correspondents said.
اضافة اعلان
Saied staged a
dramatic power grab in July last year and later pushed through a constitution
enshrining his one-man rule, in what critics have called a return to autocracy
in the only democracy to have emerged from the Arab Spring.
Protesters in
central Tunis chanted, “Down, down”, “Revolution against dictator Kais”, and
“The coup will fall.”
The march was organized by the National Salvation
Front, a coalition of opposition parties including the Islamist-inspired
Ennahdha that had dominated Tunisia’s parliament before its dissolution by
Saied.
Ali Laarayedh,
Tunisia’s former prime minister and a senior Ennahdha official, told AFP that
the protest was an expression of “anger at the state of affairs under Kais
Saied”.
“We are telling him
to leave.”
Saied’s power grab
was welcomed by some Tunisians tired of what they saw as a fractious and corrupt
system established after the 2011 revolution that ousted late dictator
Zine El Abidine Ali.
But a worsening
economic situation, compounded by supply shortages in the wake of Russia’s
invasion of Ukraine in February, has agitated many in the North African country
of 12 million.
If Saied stays,
“Tunisia will have no future,” said Laarayedh, citing growing despair, poverty
and unemployment.
The National
Salvation Front has announced it will boycott a December vote to elect a new
parliament with limited powers.
Ennahdha’s deep
ideological rival, the secular
Free Destourian Party (PDL), also organized a
protest in the capital on Saturday.
Saied “is doing
nothing, and things are only getting worse”, said Souad, a pensioner in her 60s
at the secular party’s demonstration.
Some of the
protesters carried empty containers to symbolize the rising cost of water due
to inflation, which hit 9.1 percent in September.
Around 1,500 people joined the Ennahdha-led
demonstration, while nearly 1,000 attended the PDL protest, the interior
ministry told AFP.
In public remarks,
Saied has argued he was working to “correct” economic troubles he had inherited
from Tunisia’s post-Ben Ali leadership.
Cash-strapped
Tunisia is in talks with the International Monetary Fund for a bailout loan of
about $2 billion.
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