TUNIS (Reuters) – Tunisian President Kais Saied’s chief of staff and closest adviser Nadia Akacha said on her Facebook page on Monday that she had resigned due to “fundamental differences in opinion” over the country’s interests.
Akacha has been Saied’s closest aide since he rose to office in a 2019 landslide and since his July moves to suspend parliament and assume executive power in a measure his foes call a coup.
“I decided to resign after two years… I am faced with fundamental differences in opinion regarding (Tunisia’s) best interests and I think it is my duty to withdraw,” she wrote, without elaborating.
There was no immediate comment or official confirmation of her resignation from the presidential palace.
Akacha had been described by Tunisian government officials, foreign diplomats and former president staff as Saied’s closest and most trusted adviser and the conduit for almost all interactions with him.
Saied’s seizure of broad powers and declared plans to redraw the constitution have cast Tunisia’s decade-old democratic system into doubt and hindered a push for an international rescue plan for public finances.
The president has initiated an online public consultation before drafting a new constitution that he says will be put to a referendum, but has not brought major political or civil society players into the process.
Though his actions appeared to have broad support at first among Tunisians weary of economic stagnation and political paralysis, political leaders have voiced increasing opposition.
While Saied has vowed to uphold rights and freedoms won in the 2011 revolution that brought democracy and triggered the Arab spring, critics have accused the security forces of using more aggressive policing against dissent.
Major western donors meanwhile say in private that Saied is unlikely to secure international help needed to finance the budget and debt repayments without a more inclusive political approach or broad agreement on economic reforms.
(Reporting by Tarek Amara, writing by Angus McDowall, Editing by Catherine Evans, William Maclean)
