It is remarkable that most of the popular bases of the Tunisian Ennahda movement have become closer to President Kais Saied, and even expressed support for his exceptional measures announced on the twenty-fifth of July, including those related to dissolving the government, freezing the powers of Parliament and lifting the immunity of its deputies.

There are also leaders in the movement who announced their support for the actions of Kais Saied. They are those who are fed up with the actions of Rached Ghannouchi and those close to him – such as Abdel Karim Al-Harouni, Noureddine Al-Bhiri and Rafiq Abdel Salam. Such leaders can no longer accept his insistence on denying reality and not acknowledging the disastrous failure that the movement has incurred during the past years. Its electoral balance has eroded and turned into an isolated movement accused of being behind all the predicaments and crises that the country has known, whether they were financial, economic, political or social, leading to the catastrophic health situation due to the spread of the Corona pandemic.

The cracks that appeared in the special session of the movement’s Shoura Council confirmed that the crisis is essentially structural, methodological and moral, and that the movement quickly ended up in a situation of internal exhaustion after being consumed by the game of personal and factional interests within it.

It turned out that all the slogans that the movement used to raise during the period of secret action and the stage of opposition evaporated and turned into its opposite. It became clear that political Islam movements are opportunistic currents that float the local with the regional and the international, and mixes the mundane with the religious, and the real with the metaphysical, to ultimately achieve authoritarian interests even by trampling on all moral, religious and human standards.

From within the socially conservative system, Kais Saied came to draw attention to himself after 2011 by insisting that he speak to the media in standard Arabic, cite Quranic verses and verses from ancient poetry, and constantly talk about the independence of the national decision, so he was able to convey to everyone the impression that he is clean-handed and straightforward. He ran in the elections with simple donations from his simple supporters, most of whom were his old students, current students and the unemployed, and won as a title of integrity and transparency in the face of a competitor accused of corruption.

He is the man who is called by his fans with the title of ostedh (Professor ), with its moral, social and cognitive symbolism and belonging to the middle class that always bears the burden of fateful transformations. The man who, after his inauguration, refused to move to the presidential palace in Carthage, and refused to intervene while he is the country’s president to amend the decision of the Judicial Council to transfer his wife, who is supposed to be the first lady of Tunisia, to work as a judge in Sfax, 270 km from the capital. The man who continued his old simple habits of frequenting cafes and his appearance buying a loaf of bread from the bakery, and the man who did not miss an occasion without emphasizing the necessity of eradicating corruption and fighting the corrupt, and who defined his political, economic and social positions with criteria, the first of which are confronting lobbies, gangs and theft of public money, and defending the poor and the deprived.

This man was able to pull the rug out once and for all from under the feet of the Muslim Brotherhood after they allied themselves with corruption, and normalized with the corrupt, and the signs of obscene wealth appeared on them, and they were drawn into the temptations of government and power, and they switched from criticizing the previous regimes to adopting the worst of what was in them. Ennahda allied itself with those controlling the parallel economy and tampering with the power of the simple citizen, and it turned from opposing the one-party system to being covered by the corrupt lobby, and Kais Saied referred to this on several occasions.

The Ennahda movement was morally stripped, while Kais Saied emerged as a religious, conservative, clean-handed man, a fighter against corruption and a defender of the poor. This is what made wide currents of Salafis, conservatives, and supporters of Ennahda who are not   very ideologized, to support him and to declare their support for his decisions.

Meanwhile, the Brotherhood’s hard-line wing continued to talk about a coup, not only to defend the privileges of ruling at home, but also out of fear that these decisions would isolate them from their regional and international role.

Ennahda’s decision during the past ten years was clear: to be in power, regardless of the size of its presence in it, and not to be in the opposition, even if it gained its leadership. Therefore, it allied itself with corruption, and when it clashed with Kais Saied’s attitude, it sought to distort it and made several attempts in the direction of demonizing him, but it did not succeed in compromising the value and moral aspect rooted in him; it is the aspect that he insisted on arming himself with to face what he considered conspiracies targeting him and the state and society.

Today – after losing the legitimacy of discourse and tools of governance – Ennahda finds itself politically and socially isolated, and it seems that Kais Saied is the major beneficiary in the country, provided that he fulfills his promises to the people who support him, including continuing the war on corruption and revealing all the hidden facts about the past ten years.

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