Ennahda still trying to use Tunisia developments in its favor

Sara Rashad

Despite its current calm, Ennahda Movement, the branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia, still clings to a policy of secret escalation against Tunisian President Kais Saied who has become the movement’s no. 1 enemy.

Ennahda’s vice-president, Ali Laarayedh, told the BBC recently that his movement still views the events in Tunisia as a ‘coup’.

In this, Laarayedh contradicts the movement’s leader Rached Ghannouchi who considered the same events ‘an opportunity for reform’.

Ennahda apparently tries to take some steps backwards in its attempt to cope up with developments in Tunisia and the loss of the political gains it made in the past 11 years.

Attacks against Saied

Restraint as a policy cannot apparently prevent Ennahda from returning to its traditional course of attacks against the Tunisian president.

The movement is launching media warfare against Saied with the aim of undermining the support base he managed to create since dissolving the parliament and sacking the cabinet on July 25.

The British news site, Middle East Eye, has recently claimed that Saudi Arabia had used the Israeli Pegasus spyware to spy on the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Tunisia.

The site, opposed to Saied’s decisions, said Ghannouchi’s phone number was found in a list of 50,000 phone numbers obtained by a group of international organizations and newspapers that cooperated in investigating the Pegasus spying scandal.

Ennahda did not miss this opportunity. It expressed condemnation of the targeting of the head of Tunisia’s legislative authority by a foreign power.

It considered this an attack on the Tunisian state and its sovereignty. The movement also called on Tunisian authorities to investigate the matter and take the required action against this ‘external aggression’.