Tunisian president launches coup amid protests against mass COVID-19 deaths
On Sunday, President Kaïs Saïed sacked the Islamist Ennahda Movement government, suspended parliament and deployed the army amid mounting anger among workers.
On Sunday, President Kaïs Saïed sacked the Islamist Ennahda Movement government, suspended parliament and deployed the army amid mounting anger among workers.
Ten years after revolutionary uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, explosive anger is building in working-class districts across North Africa amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eight years after the ouster of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali in 2011, renewed mass struggles are erupting.
The new wave of protests was prompted by anger over mass unemployment, corruption and the 2018 finance law.
Protests against unemployment and the 2018 austerity budget in the industrial heartlands of southern Tunisia are now spreading across the country.
Amid growing social unrest, Washington and Paris are boosting military aid to Tunisia to prepare to suppress social opposition in the working class.
None of the grievances that drove the working class into revolutionary struggle five years ago against first Ben Ali in Tunisia, then Mubarak in Egypt, have been resolved.
The coming to power of Nidaa Tounes represents an attempt to restore the old Ben Ali regime that the working class toppled in revolutionary struggles nearly four years ago.
The Socialist Party government warmly welcomed Egyptian military dictator al-Sisi.
The Tunisian ruling elite is desperately seeking a way out of a deepening political and economic crisis.
Opposition leader Mohamed Brahmi was killed outside his home in Tunis by unidentified attackers.
The bourgeois media is seeking to endow ex-Prime Minister Hamad Jebali with democratic credentials, despite his role in betraying the aspirations of the workers and youth who overthrew the dictator Ben Ali and repressing social protests.
The current political eruption in Tunisia, the most widespread since the events of late 2010 and early 2011, occurs just days before the second anniversary of the fall of US-backed dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt.
Mass protests and attacks on the ruling Islamist Ennahda party offices broke out throughout Tunisia after the assassination of a prominent Tunisian secular politician
At the last minute, the UGTT union called off a one-day national strike called against the assault by Islamist thugs on UGTT members.
Police stood aside last week as hundreds of Salafist thugs attacked workers and youth in Sidi Bouzid, the starting point of the Tunisian Revolution and the Arab Spring.
On Tuesday, several thousand workers demonstrated in Sidi Bouzid.
On June 14 former President Ben Ali, along with 22 Interior Ministry officials, stood trial of for the massacres in Thala and Kasserine during the Tunisian revolution.
The failure of strike calls by petty-bourgeois “left” parties in Egypt highlights the need for an independent political struggle by the working class with the aim of taking power and establishing socialism.
Thousands marched in Cairo, Alexandria, and other cities against the US-backed Egyptian military junta yesterday.