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He is very close to President Kaïs Saïed who has just announced his resignation. Interior Minister Taoufik Charfeddine, one of the Tunisian president’s trusted men, announced on Friday that he had asked Kaïs Saïed to end his functions. He says he wants to devote himself to his children after the death of his wife last year.
In Tunisia, the influential Interior Minister Taoufik Charfeddine announced his resignation on Friday March 23. In office since October 2021, he told the press that he had asked the president to end his duties.
The 54-year-old man says he wants to devote himself to his children after the death of his wife. “The time has come for me to dedicate myself to this responsibility that she left to me,” added Taoufik Charfeddine. His wife, mother of their three children, lost her life following a fire caused by a gas leak in their residence.
Campaign Pillar
This former lawyer was one of the pillars of the electoral campaign that led Kaïs Saïed to the presidency in 2019. Taoufik Charfeddine then briefly held the Interior portfolio between September 2020 and January 2021, before being dismissed under pressure from the Islamist-inspired party Ennahdha, then the main force in Parliament, which the Head of State finally suspended during his July 2021 coup.
Appointed again to the Interior by Kaïs Saïed in October 2021, he has since played a leading role in this position alongside the Head of State in the establishment of a new hyper-presidentialist system, decried by its detractors as an authoritarian drift.
>> To see: Parliament in Tunisia: an assembly with limited powers under the shadow of Saïed
“Violent and dangerous” speech
Tunisian NGOs had thus called on the Minister of the Interior on March 8 to apologize after a “violent and dangerous” speech. In a vitriolic statement the day before during a trip to Ben Guerdane, near the border with Libya, the minister attacked “media mercenaries, businessmen, trade unionists and parties who sold the homeland “.
“They are traitors,” he added, calling on Tunisians to support President Saïed, “an honest and patriotic man”, according to a video of the visit released by his ministry.
In a joint statement, more than 30 organizations, including the UGTT trade union center and the Tunisian League for Human Rights, denounced a “shabby” speech, “sectarian” and which “creates division”.
Criticizing “the language of threat and intimidation” used, they considered that it was a “dangerous populist discourse which portends a police state” recalling the system in place under the dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, overthrown in 2011.
The Tunisian presidency regularly broadcast videos of the frequent meetings between Taoufik Charfeddine and Kaïs Saïed at the Carthage Palace. During a recent meeting, on February 23, Kaïs Saïed had called on the authorities to “watch” over migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, two days after having caused an outcry with a speech deemed “racist and hateful” by denouncing the arrival in Tunisia of “hordes of migrants” and a plot “to change the demographic composition” of the country.
>> To read also: Anti-migrant remarks: “A new identity discourse at the top of the Tunisian state”
With AFP