Tunis, March 31 (BNA) Tunisian President Kais Saied issued a decree on Wednesday evening to dissolve parliament, suspended since last year, after defying it to vote to cancel the decrees he used.
Speaking after an online session of more than half of the parliament’s members, the first since he suspended the parliament in July, Saeed accused them of a failed coup and plotting against state security and ordered investigations against them, Reuters reported.
The parliament session and Said’s response exacerbated Tunisia’s political crisis, although it was not clear if they would push any immediate change in his grip on power.
Any move to arrest members of parliament who participated in Wednesday’s session, as Saied’s threat to conduct investigations might suggest, would mark a major escalation in the standoff between Saied and his opponents.
“We must protect the state from division … We will not allow the aggressors to continue their aggression against the state,” Saeed said in a video posted online.
Said, a former law professor, says his actions were constitutional and necessary to save Tunisia from years of political paralysis and economic stagnation at the hands of a corrupt, self-serving elite.
He says he will form a committee to rewrite the constitution and put it to a referendum in July and then hold parliamentary elections in December.
Tunisia’s 2014 constitution stipulates that the House of Representatives must remain in session during any exceptional period of the kind that Said announced last summer and that the dissolution of the House must lead to new elections, although it has not yet been announced.
The Free Constitutional Party, a major opposition party that the suffrage bill would be the largest in parliament if elections were held, urged Saeed to call for early elections after parliament was dissolved.
Abir Moussa, head of the party, said that Saeed has no choice according to the constitution, and he must call for elections within three months.
Said, a political newcomer, was elected in 2019 with a landslide victory in the second round over a media mogul who was facing corruption charges, and promised to clean up Tunisian politics.