In Tunisia, the influential Minister of the Interior Taoufik Charfeddine announced his resignation on Friday (March 23rd). In office since October 2021, he told the press that he had asked the president to step down.

The 54-year-old says he wants to devote himself to his children after the death of his wife. "The time has come for me to devote myself to this responsibility that she has left me," added Taoufik Charfeddine. His wife, the mother of their three children, lost her life following a fire caused by a gas leak in their home.

Campaign pillar

This former lawyer was one of the pillars of the electoral campaign that led Kaïs Saïed to the presidency in 2019. Taoufik Charfeddine then briefly occupied the Interior portfolio between September 2020 and January 2021, before being dismissed under pressure from the Islamist-inspired Ennahdha party, then the main force in Parliament, which the head of state finally suspended during his July 2021 coup.

Reappointed to the Interior by Kaïs Saïed in October 2021, he has since played a leading role alongside the head of state in the establishment of a new hyper-presidentialist system, decried by his critics as an authoritarian drift.

>> Watch: Parliament in Tunisia: an assembly with limited powers under the shadow of Saïed

'Violent and dangerous' speech

Tunisian NGOs had called on the Minister of the Interior on 8 March to apologise after a "violent and dangerous" speech. In a vitriolic statement the day before during a trip to Ben Guerdane, near the border with Libya, the minister had attacked the "media mercenaries, businessmen, trade unionists and parties who sold the homeland".

"They are traitors," he added, calling on Tunisians to support President Saïed, "an honest and patriotic man," according to a video of the visit released by his ministry.

In a joint statement, more than 30 organizations, including the UGTT trade union center and the Tunisian League for Human Rights, denounced a "shabby", "sectarian" speech that "creates division".

Lambasting "the language of threat and intimidation" used, they said it was a "dangerous populist discourse that portends a police state" reminiscent of the system in place under the dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, overthrown in 2011.

The Tunisian presidency regularly broadcast videos of the frequent meetings between Taoufik Charfeddine and Kaïs Saïed at the Carthage Palace. At a recent meeting on February 23, Kaïs Saïed called on the authorities to "watch" over migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, two days after provoking an outcry with a speech deemed "racist and hateful" by denouncing the arrival in Tunisia of "hordes of migrants" and a plot "to change the demographic composition" of the country.

>> Read also: Anti-migrant remarks: "A new identity discourse at the top of the Tunisian state"

With AFP

The summary of the week France 24 invites you to look back on the news that marked the week

I subscribe

Take international news with you everywhere! Download the France 24 app