The prefect of Tunis, Kamel Feki, a close friend of President Kaïs Saïed, has been appointed interior minister to replace the influential Taoufik Charfeddine who announced his resignation to devote himself to his family.

President Saied issued two decrees, the first ending Mr. Charfeddine’s functions and a second appointing Kamel Feki as head of the interior, the presidency said in a statement on the night of Friday March 17 to Saturday March 18. .

A law graduate, Mr. Feki is a former finance ministry official. He has held the post of prefect of Tunis since the end of 2021. He is part of the circle very close to President Saïed, and strongly defends his decisions. Kamel Feki had been talked about recently by banning the demonstration of the Salvation Front, the main opposition coalition. Speaking of imprisoned opponents, he said “their guilt was almost certain under exceptional measures.”

Mr. Charfeddine, 54, announced to the press on Friday that he had asked Mr. Saïed to end his functions, indicating that he wanted to devote himself to his three children after the death of his wife in June 2022 following a a fire caused by a gas leak in their residence. “The time has come for me to dedicate myself to this responsibility she left me,” Charfeddine added, thanking President Saied “for being understanding” and allowing him to step down. .

Former lawyer, pillar of the electoral campaign which led Kaïs Saïed to the presidency in 2019, Mr. Charfeddine had briefly occupied the portfolio of the interior between September 2020 and January 2021. He had been dismissed under pressure from the party of Islamist inspiration Ennahda, the president’s pet peeve, and at the time the main force in Parliament that the Head of State suspended during his July 2021 coup.

” Traitors “

Appointed again internally by Mr. Saïed in October 2021, he had since played a leading role in this position alongside the Head of State. In particular in the establishment of a new hyper-presidentialist system, decried by its detractors as an authoritarian drift which sounded the death knell for democracy born of the first revolt of the Arab Spring in 2011.

Tunisian NGOs called on Mr. Charfeddine on March 8 to apologize after a “violent and dangerous” speech in which he called the media, trade unionists, businessmen and political parties “traitors”.

In a vitriolic statement the day before during a trip to Ben Guerdane, near the border with Libya, the minister attacked “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.”

In a joint statement, more than 30 organizations, including the UGTT trade union center and the Tunisian Human Rights League, denounced a “shabby speech”, “sectarian” and which “creates division”. Criticizing “the language of threat and intimidation” used, they considered that it was “a dangerous populist discourse which portends a police state” recalling the system in place under the dictatorship of Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali , overturned in 2011.

The Tunisian presidency regularly broadcast videos of the frequent meetings between MM. Saïed and Charfeddine at the Palace of Carthage. During a recent meeting on February 23, Mr. Saïed had called on the authorities to “watch” over migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, two days after having caused 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.