Wed 29 September 2021:
Najla Bouden Ramadhane, a World Bank-experienced university engineer, has risen from political obscurity to become Tunisia’s — and the Arab world’s — first female prime minister.
According to Reuters, Ramadhane was named president on Wednesday after Kais Saied, who took office two years ago, fired her predecessor and suspended parliament in July.
Saied characterized his actions as necessary interim measures to address the country’s economic difficulties and the COVID-19 emergency. However, coronavirus cases in the country have decreased since then, while Saied – a former constitutional law professor — has continued to seek for more unilateral power, which his critics see as a coup.
According to The National, based in the United Arab Emirates, the new prime minister is a 60-year-old geosciences professor at Tunis’s National Engineering School. According to the news agency, she would quit her current position as director general in charge of quality at the Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research, where she is in charge of World Bank initiatives.
Ramadhane’s appointment appears to be aimed at appeasing Saied’s critics at home and abroad, who have been pressuring him to form a new government in the North African country, which was at the epicenter of the Arab Spring uprising in 2011 and was the first to depose an authoritarian leader in favor of democracy.
However, Samir Dilou, a former government minister who resigned from Ennahdha – Tunisia’s largest party – called Bouden’s appointment “illegal” because it was based on Saied’s presidential decrees.
In a message published on his Facebook page, Dilou said the new Cabinet would face “great challenges given the huge difficulties the country’s finance and economy are going through and its fragile sanitary situation” during the pandemic.
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