Sana al-Morsani, the official spokesman for the Shura Council of the Ennahda Movement, said that calling for early elections in Tunisia remains a viable option presented by the constitution as long as the political and constitutional crisis continues in the country.
“We still believe that the national dialogue is possible, and we support the Tunisian General Labor Union’s adherence to this dialogue,” Sana added, during her participation in the “Evening” program on Al-Jazeera Mubasher, on Friday.
The Tunisian General Labor Union called, on Thursday, to quickly overcome the political and constitutional crisis in Tunisia as soon as possible, or to go to early elections, in light of the aggravation of the power crisis between the institutions of the Presidency of the Republic, the Presidency of the Government and the Presidency of Parliament.
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She added that President Qais Saeed’s statements reduced the chances of the dialogue’s success, adding that “the president is called today to assume his political and constitutional responsibilities to resolve the crisis and supervise the dialogue, or return to the popular will to say its word through the constitutional mechanisms represented in the general elections.”
For his part, Abdel-Taif El-Hanachi, an academic and political analyst, considered that Tunisia is experiencing a real political impasse and a complex economic crisis, in addition to a clear state of mistrust between the three major institutions in the state.
The Tunisian academic said that the proposal submitted by the General Union of Labor, which stipulated the success of dialogue or early elections, was a reasonable proposal, but the president’s response to it was wrong, especially as he considered it “a dialogue that lacks the character of dialogue and does not amount to patriotism.”
Hanachi stressed that all Tunisians today are at a crossroads between making the dialogue successful or going to the polls to resolve the ongoing political disputes between state institutions.
He said, “Calling elections in the general conditions that Tunisia is going through will not solve the problem, but will restore the same previous political map,” stressing – in the same context – the mandatory political dialogue between Tunisian political parties to achieve a political and democratic transition.
The Tunisian academic considered that the process of making the dialogue successful requires consensus between all Tunisian political currents and the initiation of work without preconditions in order to get out of the political impasse that Tunisia has been experiencing since last January.
For his part, Tunisian political activist Al-Mahdi Al-Bahi said that he is not a supporter of the national dialogue between Tunisian political and party currents, because previous experiences revealed that any dialogue in Tunisia is based on the process of sharing between major parties, while the people remain outside the future political equations.
He added, “I am in favor of calling for early elections, but after setting the election law and reconsidering the Tunisian political system of government, because during the past months we were in the process of a three-way struggle between three people who turned into institutions that struggle among themselves.”
“I call on the Tunisian parliament to reconsider the electoral law and the system of government that combines the parliamentary and semi-presidential systems,” he said, stressing the need to adopt a purely parliamentary system of government based on the rule of the majority winning the elections and bearing its responsibility before the people in forming the government and overall supervision of the country’s interests.