UAE media celebrates Tunisia’s new constitution

The UAE media has celebrated the adoption of the new constitution in Tunisia, proposed by the President of the Republic, Qais Saeed, as a victory for the counter-revolution backed by Abu Dhabi.

The Emirati media of all kinds, especially its trolls on social media and TV channels, allocated special coverage for voting on the referendum to mobilize popular support for Saeed’s referendum.

The Emirati media focused on covering the widespread famous boycott of the vote on the Tunisian referendum, which did not exceed 30%. It claimed that it was met with great popular support.

Under the title Tunisia Forsake the Brotherhood, the Emirati newspaper Al-Khaleej wrote, claiming that when the Ennahda movement wrote the constitution in 2014, its goal was to hijack the 2011 revolution in Tunisia.

In its incitement against the political components in Tunisia, the newspaper said, “ِAlnahda succeeded with corrupt political parties and leaders eager for power and corruption in forming suspicious alliances, and dragging the country into a black decade during which the Tunisian people suffered impoverishment, terrorism, corruption, looting and destruction of political life.”

“It can be said that the Tunisian people declared their final victory over political Islam, turned a dark and bleak phase in their history, and opened a new page for the establishment of the Third Republic, the restoration of the spirit of the Jasmine Revolution, the establishment of a state of justice, equality and freedoms, and the rejection of extremism, terrorism and corruption,” according to the newspaper’s claim.

Well-informed diplomatic sources revealed that the UAE financed propaganda campaigns in Tunisia in support of passing the constitution of Qais Saeed.

According to the Tunisian Observer website, there were suspicious funds from the UAE in the campaigns of several associations and people supporting the constitution and mobilizing the popular vote in support of it.

The sources stated that the UAE believes that passing the constitution of Qais Saeed is a great victory for the counter-revolution that it led for years in Tunisia to thwart the democratic experiment in the cradle of the Arab Spring revolutions.

The new draft constitution became an alternative to the 2014 constitution, which was drafted in a participatory manner after the revolution. It was published in the Official Gazette on June 30 and was followed by sudden amendments during the propaganda campaign on July 8 to reform 46 chapters that included the various chapters and articles of the constitution.

Saeed went ahead with the referendum, despite the boycott of the majority of the party spectrum in the country and the opposition of a broad civil and societal spectrum to the draft constitution, which the President of the Republic drafted himself.

This is after he abandoned the proposal of the Constitutional Drafting Committee that he appointed to write the text of the new constitution, headed by Sadiq Belaid.

The referendum is the first stage of the structural transition that Saeed established and announced a year ago, on July 25, 2021, when he suspended the work of Parliament and dissolved the government of Hisham Al-Mashishi.

Tunisian experts and opponents blamed Said for avoiding a stipulation in the referendum decree on a specific participation rate of the electoral body, which amounts to 9,296,000 people on the list of those registered to participate in the constitutional referendum, according to the National Elections Authority.