Tunisians on Monday marked the eighth anniversary of the revolution amid a mixed assessment of their gains. Tension over the occasion was exacerbated by partisan conflicts and the approaching general strike to demand better staff.
Habib Bourguiba, the main street of the capital, witnessed the ceremony, which witnessed the major demonstration of the revolution on 14 January 2011.
Thousands of supporters of the Nahdha movement joined the ruling coalition as part of a speech and song festival. The director of the island's office in Tunis, Lotfi Hajji, said the discrepancy had emerged between those who came to celebrate and those who came to protest against the economic situation.
In their speeches, the leaders of the Ennahda Movement emphasized the success of the revolution despite the economic and social difficulties that they considered to be overcome by national unity and dialogue between the various parties.
Hajji pointed out that the supporters of the Popular Front - a coalition of left-wing opposition parties - demonstrated in the same street and raised slogans against the head of the Nahdha movement, Rashid al-Ghannouchi. The Front has accused al-Nahdha for years of having links to the assassination of opponents in 2013 and that it has a secret apparatus. Which the movement strongly denies.
As supporters of the Republican Party (opposition), shouting slogans focused on social and economic demands.
At the same time, the head of the Al Jazeera bureau quoted the Tunisian General Union of Labor (the largest trade union in Tunisia) as holding a general strike scheduled for Thursday.
In a speech at the Bardo museum in the capital, Tunisian President Béji Caid al-Sibsi called on the Union to review its stance on the general strike and warned against repeated bloody confrontations in 1978, calling on the Union and the government for further negotiations to find a solution.
President al-Sibsi considered the democratic experiment not to be safe and called on everyone to work to protect it.
For his part, Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki praised in a video of the Tunisian Revolution on the level of democratic transition and freedoms, accusing the counterrevolutionaries that they have crippled the economy during the few years after the revolution.
Marzouki said that the counterrevolution was gradually weakening, and he called on the Tunisians to return the train to the track so that the victories of the revolution would continue, as he put it.