TUNISIA
By JTW
July 29, 2013
By Fuad Ferhavi
On July 25th, Mohamed Brahmi, leader of Tunisia’s main opposition paryt Movement of the People, was killed in a spray of bullets from unknown assailants as he sat in his car outside his home in Tunis. With uncertainty abound, Tunisia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs has announced that it has started an investigation to shed light on the assassination.
Brahmi, who counted Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser as one of his influences, was symbolic figure in Tunisia’s nationalist movement. His Movement of the People party has created various (albeit short-lived) alliances since its establishment in March 2011. These largely nationalist, secularist, leftist coalitions were decidedly against the political Islamism of the dominant Ennahda party. Brahmi’s recent, attention-grabbing response to the coup in Egypt sharply contrasted with Ennahda’s position. Brahmi had supported the coup and remarked that “Egypt opens a brand new page in its history” while Ennahda was calling for demonstrations to support deposed-president Morsi.
Internal disagreements within the Movement of the People party had caused Brahmi and other party leaders to leave the party and form a new party—the Populist Movement Party. One of the chief reasons for the break in the party was Brahmi and his allies’ opposition to an alliance between the Movement of the People party and the Nida Tunisia party. According to the President of General Secretary Mohamed Habib Gadiri, there were three main reasons why Brahmi refused the Movement of the People-Nida Tunisia coalition: First: They refused to form a coalition with Nida Tunisia–which bundled leftist, liberal, and nationalist tendencies–as they viewed it as an extension of the deposed President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s shuttered Constitutional Party. Second: They refused to compromise the independence of the Movement of the People party’s decision-making. Third: They stressed the necessity to distinguish between political Islam and the belief of the Tunisian people.
After the toppling of Egyptian President Morsi, the Executive Office of Nida Tunisia reportedly held a special meeting to address the situation in Tunisia. Afterward, the party’s leader, Beji Caid Essebsi called for the “dissolution of the government and the establishment of a national liberation government of technocrats”. Additionally, he used the following statements to describe the situation in Tunisia: “elections based on compromise have lost their legitimacy”; “Ennahda and its coalition partners were unable to compromise during the constitution writing process”; “instead of capable people, partisans were appointed to state institutions”; “the judiciary was interfered with and used against the opposition”, and “violence has been incited”. The announcement that emerged from the meeting was that “Nida Tunisia Movement’s leadership asserts that it is completely objective and that the time has come to re-examine the democratic transition process.”
Thus the assassination of opposition leader Mohamed Brahmi occurred in a very sensitive and ominous context. Particularly significant is the fact that the assassination happened right before the passing of a series of legislation and the approval of a constitution—considered by the governing coalition to be the “guarantor of a sustainable and successful democracy”. Further adding to the political nature of the assassination is the experience in February when leftist opposition leader Chokri Belaid was assassinated. In that instance, debates following the assassination resulted in the resignation of Tunisian Prime Minister Hamadi Jebali. President Monsef Marzouki has highlighted that the new killing happened just as Chokri’s death was being resolved. The question at hand is whether the current assassination will prompt the same response as the last. Either the government will fall or Tunisia’s young democracy will suffer greatly. Another angle to watch is the regional and international reaction to the political scramble that is sure to ensue.
