Tunisian authorities have arrested a prominent opposition leader and three other officials from his party in an escalation of President Kais Saied’s campaign against political opponents, which began after he seized full power over the North African nation nearly two years ago.
The arrest Monday evening targeted Rachid al-Ghannouchi, the leader of the Ennahda party, which dominated Tunisia’s Parliament for years during the country’s short-lived democratic experiment, becoming deeply unpopular for its Islamist views and missteps while in power. That unpopularity has made Ennahda a convenient target of Mr. Saied’s campaign against the political establishment, with Mr. al-Ghannouchi the most prominent of his political opponents to be targeted so far.
Ennahda said about 100 plainclothes police officers raided and searched Mr. al-Ghannouchi’s home in the capital, Tunis, taking him and another party member to a military barracks. The authorities then raided Ennahda’s Tunis headquarters, arresting two other prominent party officials, and searched the home of Mr. al-Ghannouchi’s daughter, according to Ennahda and Tunisian prosecutors.
“The Ennahda Movement condemns this very dangerous development and demands the immediate release” of Mr. al-Ghannouchi, the party said in a statement posted on Mr. al-Ghannouchi’s Facebook page. “It also calls on all liberals to stand together in the face of these oppressive practices.”
Tunisia was the only country to emerge from the wave of Arab Spring uprising in 2011 as a new democracy, an experiment that endured for about a decade. But its progress unraveled when Mr. Saied, who had been elected as a political outsider in 2019, established one-man rule in 2021 by suspending the country’s powerful, Ennahda-led Parliament.
Since mid-February, facing intensifying unpopularity over a looming economic collapse, Mr. Saied has ramped up his repression of dissent, arresting at least two dozen opposition politicians, journalists, activists, judges and others in what analysts said was an attempt to distract from his own mistakes and deflect blame for Tunisia’s deteriorating situation.
He also recently appointed a hard-line new minister of the interior, who ordered Monday’s crackdown on Ennahda.
The latest developments had the makings of a concerted offensive against Ennahda and its main opposition partner, an anti-Saied coalition known as the National Salvation Front.
Mr. al-Ghannouchi and his party have been among Mr. Saied’s main antagonists since Tunisians embraced the president’s power grab partly because they detested Ennahda: The party had been an important player in government, if not in outright control, since Tunisians overthrew their longtime autocratic ruler, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, in the 2011 revolution.
“This is a, if not the, biggest slice of red meat that many of Saied’s initial supporters — including some in U.G.T.T. — had wanted,” said Monica Marks, an assistant professor of Middle East politics at New York University Abu Dhabi who studies Tunisia, using the initials of Tunisia’s powerful general labor union. “But it by no means solves his problems on the socioeconomic front.”
Mr. Saied’s security services have detained and questioned Mr. al-Ghannouchi, who is in his 80s, several times over the last two years. But this was the first time he had been arrested without warning.
The arrest came after Mr. al-Ghannouchi said in a meeting on Saturday that excluding the opposition from Tunisian politics, including Ennahda, risked starting a “civil war,” a phrase he used repeatedly. The authorities pounced on his words to charge him with incitement, saying in a statement that they had been authorized to do so under the country’s antiterrorism law.
Ennahda’s statement outlined a series of what the party called violations of basic legal procedure during the raids. Security personnel had barred Mr. al-Ghannouchi’s lawyers from attending the search of his house or his interrogation, it said, and Mr. al-Ghannouchi was refusing to speak without a lawyer present.
Even so, it said, investigators had kept him sitting in the interrogation room all night, refusing to allow him to use the bathroom unless the door was kept open.
Though moderate compared with other Islamist movements in the Middle East, Ennahda’s religious orientation spooked many Tunisians who feared it would undo the country’s secular values and freedoms. It did not help that Mr. Ben Ali’s government had demonized Ennahda for years before the 2011 revolution.
Ennahda’s dominance in government — Mr. al-Ghannouchi was the speaker of Parliament before it was dissolved, and Ennahda figures regularly served as prime minister or in cabinet — meant it was closely associated, fairly or not, with the incompetence and corruption that plagued Tunisia’s post-revolution governments. The party was also blamed by many for those governments’ failure to deliver the economic prosperity Tunisians had demanded during the uprising.
The economic problems that had been building for the last decade have culminated over the last year in a massive crisis compounded by the worst drought in years. Inflation is emptying Tunisians’ wallets; basic goods such as oil, sugar and coffee have disappeared from supermarket shelves. Migration to Europe from Tunisia has surged.
Yet Mr. Saied has appeared more interested in overhauling the country’s political system than in rescuing the economy, ramming through a new Constitution he drafted that concentrates power in the president’s hands and neutralizes Parliament.
That has led some Tunisians to turn against him. But for many, the great fear that Ennahda, or an opposition coalition including it, will return to power in Mr. Saied’s stead, has kept them from embracing his opponents.
