Tunisia: The difficult equation between the prisoner and secret bird in the runoff

Mouaz Mohammad

The Independent High Electoral Commission of Tunisia announced on Tuesday, 17 September 2019, the passage of independent candidate Qais Said and the candidate of the Party of the Heart of Tunisia, Nabil Karoui, to the run-off in the presidential elections.

This result raises an important question about the future direction of the Islamists, represented in Hizb ut-Tahrir and Ennahdha especially after the loss of the latter candidate Abdel Fattah Moro obtained 12.8% of the total votes, ranking third, in addition to the inability of former President of Tunisia Moncef Marzouki to access power again.

On Tuesday, September 17, former President Moncef Marzouki, announced his support for the candidate Qais Said, saying through his official page on the social networking site Facebook that he fully supports the candidate Qais Said in the second round of the presidential elections, a victory for the values ​​of the revolution and the spirit of the constitution and humility before the rule of the people.

Rashed Ghannouchi, head of Ennahda, said on Tuesday that the movement would support the revolutionary candidate in the second round of the presidential elections.

He added in an interview on the Tunisian channel Zitouna that Ennahda will not stand the position of neutrality in these elections.

Ghannouchi said that the movement will support the candidate that belongs to the revolution.

In March 2019, Ennahdha leader Abdellatif Mekki did not rule out Ennahdha’s support for Qais Said, and said that “all scenarios are out there,” noting that he was “known for his integrity and his distinguished academic composition”.

Al-Enaimi, a leader in Ennahda, said in a blog post on his Facebook page on Tuesday (September 17th) that if the movement held an internal referendum, Qais Said would have a higher position in the vote intentions of the movement’s voters.

According to Tunisian media, the personality of Said and his intellectual trends raise concerns for some people in the Tunisian street, especially after many sources talked about his closeness to the Islamic trend, and adopted a set of ideas close to religious trends, but others deny this, pointing out that he is intellectually close to the left and that his campaign manager is a leftist.

There is also support from Hizb ut-Tahrir for Said because of the latter’s meeting with the former official spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir Reda Belhaj in December 2017, but the presidential candidate responds to these charges by saying that it was a meeting to talk about the general situation in the country.

During his hosting of a program on Al-Zaytoonah channel, which is close to Ennahdha in 2016, he said that he rejects the law of equality in inheritance, pointing out that the state is the religion of Islam, according to the constitutional text.

Said’s ideas are relatively close to the trends of Islamic movements which support his idea of ​​supporting the run-off of the presidential elections, especially since the other candidate Nabil Karawi is accused of corruption and tax evasion.

Qais exonerates himself

In light of analyzes confirming the Said proximity to the Islamic currents, the Tunisian judge Kalthoum Kno ruled out that Qais is to be linked to or supported by the Renaissance, especially since the head of his campaign is a leftist called Reda Lenin.

“Redha Lenin hates Islamists and has been involved in skirmishes that led some of them to attack him with knives, ” Kno said in a post on her official Facebook page on Monday, September 16, 2019.