 Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch and today we're going to reach here which is going to see a major constitutional referendum on the 25th of July. Now we've talked about this issue before as well. Last year President Qaiz Said assumed executive power, took a lot of decisions that centralized a lot of power in his hands and then promised that he would offer a new constitution. Now this constitution was supposed to replace the one which was introduced after the Arab Spring protests of 2011 and this draft is out, political parties trade unions among a number of other sectors not at all happy with this draft because they say it actually gives even more power to the president. To talk more about this, we have with us Father Lalireza, the founder and editor-in-chief of Meshkal. Father, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Father, could you first start telling us a bit about this draft constitution which will be put to vote on the 25th? What are some of the key characteristics of this document? Sure, the main sort of thrust is that it will be basically doing away with what had been a divided executive between the president and the prime minister and it will be giving all of the power to the presidency. We'll see that there is still a parliament, but it seems that its powers are vastly reduced. There seems to be very few checks on the presidency. Actually one of the advisors who was involved in the drafting of this version, this draft has given an interview where he's actually condemned the final version. He says that the version he presented to the president, all of the checks that were there have been reduced and it's no longer just a hyper-presidential system, but he says that it really is a dictatorial system. One of the criticisms we've seen from many political parties, that said, human rights are still protected within the new draft constitution, but many of the institutions and institutional checks that were there to really guarantee them seem to have been taken away. That seems to be the main concern that we've heard from human rights activists. When it comes to the union, the main union, the UGTT, they've decided not to take an official stance on the referendum that's going to be happening on the constitution. However, when you talk to some of the top leaders in the union, they've said that they personally are not happy with the draft, and we've seen criticism of it. We've also seen other institutions basically coming out and saying we'd like to do a rewrite. We think that the writing process was very non-inclusive, and they're very concerned about the result of the constitution drafting process, which is now before a referendum only a few weeks after it's been released. Only a few weeks after it's been, we've had the text to really go over. Red Father, actually when we last mentioned that this constitution, there was supposed to be this process of public consultation inputs and all that, but it also indicated that there was actually not too much enthusiasm among the people in terms of participation. Was that vindicated over time? Was there really any public involvement at all, or was it just a small poetry of people framing it? Well, there was an online consultation. The online consultation was a multiple choice, so it's a bit limited in terms of how much that can actually go into drafting the constitution. There doesn't seem to be an indication or a methodology clearly that links the online consultation to the draft that we have now. In fact, the draft that was presented to the president was changed just two or three days afterwards by the committee that had actually done the drafting. That said, there was very low participation in the online consultation. The drafting committee that was working on it for a week before it was presented to the president had very little transparency. They took very few questions from the press. These were sort of meetings that really very few Tunisians had any sort of say over. So that certainly is one of the concerns of people who have said that this process has not been truly consultative. Right, so one of the claims, I think that at least Kaisa supporters definitely make, I'm not sure if he's made it himself. This is sort of meant to address the chaos that prevailed in the previous years. When there were multiple governments, there was no political stability, etc. So on the other hand, of course, opponents are saying that this is basically a return back to the time of Zainabdin Ben Ali, the kind of executive presidency that's there. So how does it seem when we look at some of the provisions in the document, what really does it put in, so to speak? Yeah, I think even some of Kaisa's opponents, I think, will readily admit that under the previous system, there were certainly problems. What we saw was that the divided executive between an elected president and an unelected prime minister created quite a few problems, particularly when there was quite a lot of division within the parliament, extremely fragmented. There hadn't been a real barrier for party entry. So there was multiple parties and people switching parties quite easily as well. That really opened the door to accusations of cronyism, corruption, buying people off. We also saw that there was, in fact, the way that the sort of elite consensus making worked often meant that particularly on economic issues, we saw sort of an automatic sort of neoliberal status quo continuing, whether that was sort of accepting some of the sort of conditions of the IMF and the World Bank towards greater privatization and austerity without really any debate on that. Several other things that people were very upset with, particularly, for example, during the COVID crisis, we saw a very inept, at the very least, response by the previous parliamentary system to the COVID crisis. Now, that said, it's clear that Kaisa has taken the constitution to the complete opposite direction of a highly centralized presidential system with very few checks and balances. There are no guarantees of some of the independent state bodies that previously had been assured by the constitution, whether that's the higher electoral board or whether that's an anti-corruption authority. Even there's question marks over the regulatory board for broadcasting in media. And so these are certainly some concerns that people have. You know, it's also, at the moment, I can tell you that the debate over the referendum is, for them, people who are supporting it really are not sort of supporting it on the merits of the constitution. They're supporting it either as a way to sort of say that we don't want to go back to rule under a parliamentary system where the main party, the biggest party with the Anasta-Islamist party, or they're just saying we want to basically give a vote of confidence to put in the Kaisaite, but really not engaging with the substance of the constitution. Right, I believe as far as the judges are concerned, for instance, there are restrictions on them striking as well. That seems to come after the recent protests also. Sure, yeah, the president had made several steps over the last year to really make sure that the judiciary is further under executive control. This is the effect of the steps he was taking. Now, he had said that this was because he had wanted to root out corruption in the judiciary, but judges felt that they were really seeing executive interference in a way that was cutting down their independence from the executive branch. And the constitution seems to basically solidify this into a constitutional form as well. Right, one other question. Of course, you raised the issue of the neoliberal austerity policies, which the previous governments and the previous elites were taking. But has any of that reversed under Kaisaite, which would actually lead to any kind of substantial change, or has it really continued down that path? No, for the moment, no. In fact, his major economic policy so far has been to offer amnesty to business people. Now, this is something that people had fought back very strongly against. There was an amnesty bill after the revolution in 2011 that took many years. It was finally passed, but activists who had pushed back against it had basically succeeded in limiting it to amnesty only for corrupt officials of the Ben Ali era, but not for corrupt businessmen. And the president basically extended amnesty in the hopes that this would convince these businessmen to bring money back in in the form of investments. Now, it's really not clear that that's the case. It's not clear that there's any sort of transparency or accountability in terms of actually tracking that wealth. He's made a few sort of, let's say, at the rhetorical level pay-ons to tracking down illicit capital flow that has gone out of the country to a debt audit, but he hasn't taken any substantive steps. And in the meantime, he's continuing negotiations with the IMF for a new loan of something like $4 billion, which in many cases we're hearing people say there really isn't an alternative. Even people who are very critical of the IMF are saying that Tunisia is at the moment unless there's significant debt forgiveness, unless there's really a very strong step towards economic energy and food sovereignty, there really isn't an alternative at this current moment to a new IMF loan. But it doesn't seem that the president has really tried to offer alternatives that are really substantive to the way that Tunisia was going before economically. Right, Father. And of course, too early to predict. I mean, I don't know, maybe too early to predict the outcome. But after the referendum, what really happens? What are the possibilities? It's a bit unclear. There's between the people who are against the new constitution, there's a big split between people who are going to boycotts because they see it as illegitimate and they feel that no matter what the outcome, the president will institute the constitution regardless of the referendum results. As seen in actually one of the articles of the constitution, it says that regardless of the referendum results. It does not say that if they're the yes, that the constitution will come into force. It just doesn't say the constitution will come into force on the 25th. So there's people who are boycotting and there's people who are saying no. So it's divided between those two. At the same time, it's not clear whether that will be significant enough to either lower the legitimacy of the results on the 25th or enough to actually say no. But in either case, it does seem like the president is really set on getting this constitution passed. Right. And after that, I believe then there's going to be a fresh round of elections somewhere in December. Is that the plan? This is what the president has committed to. That would be elections most likely for parliament and this new sort of legislative body, he's creating a bicameral parliamentary body that has some local element to it. But it doesn't seem that that's going to be presidential elections. It may just be parliamentary elections for what will be a much weaker parliament than the current parliament or the previous parliament, let's say. Thank you so much, Waleel, for talking to us and giving us some clarity on the processes that are going on in Tunisia right now. We'll see what happens on the 25th and hopefully talk to you after that as well. My pleasure. Thank you. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.