(Bloomberg) -- Beji Caid Essebsi, a veteran diplomat and politician who became Tunisia’s first freely elected president in decades on the promise to unite the fractured North African nation, has died after being admitted to hospital. He was 92.
His death Thursday puts Tunisia once again at a crossroads in the run-up to presidential and legislative elections that were slated for later this year. That race has already hit difficulties, not least the splintering of his Nidaa Tounes party amid a power struggle between Prime Minister Youssef Chahed and Essebsi’s son.
“With no clear front-runner in opinion polls for the presidential elections, Essebsi’s death creates an uncertain outlook for how decision-making in Tunisia will be exercised in the future,” Hamish Kinear, Middle East and North Africa analyst at the U.K.-based risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft, said in a note.
The nation of 11.5 million people that was the birthplace of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings is also grappling with a possible resurgence of terrorist attacks. It shows the split in a country that prides itself on secularism, but is also the source of a disproportionately large number of Islamic State fighters.
Delicate Time
Parliament Speaker Mohammed el-Nasser is set to take over the duties of the presidency. The state-run TAP news agency cited the elections commission as saying the voting dates would have to be changed. El-Nasser would only be able to hold office for up to 90 days.
The presidency in a statement urged Tunisians to unite and rally around constitutional institutions “to safeguard Tunisia’s future and present.” There were no details on the cause of Essebsi’s death.
Racheed Ghannouhci, the leader of Ennahda, an Islamist party that’s Nidaa’s main political rival, hailed Essebsi as “a true patriot and a pillar of Tunisia’s democratic transition.” In a statement, he called on Tunisians to support a peaceful transition of power.
Tunisia’s euro-denominated bond due 2026 reversed gains, with its yield rising 1 basis point to 6.05%, following an eight-day winning streak.
Fight for Independence
Essebsi began his career influenced by Tunisia’s post-independence leader, Habib Bourguiba. He bore a nationalist bent that would shape his thinking through subsequent decades and, at the same time, brand him as part of the old guard that Tunisians came to despise and ousted in the 2011 uprising against President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
A descendant of a wealthy Tunis family that traces its origins to a captured Sardinian slave, Essebsi was born on Nov. 29, 1926. He earned a law degree in France before the authorities expelled him for his student activism. He served as a lawyer in Tunis courts for Bourguiba’s companions in their fight for independence.
Pensive and affable, Essebsi held a number of posts from the late 1950s onward, including interior and defense minister, ambassador to France and foreign minister under Ben Ali, before retiring from public life.
But the ouster of his former boss, after a mass uprising that sent shockwaves across the Arab world, brought him out of retirement, and he briefly served as prime minister before founding Nidaa Tounes.
Nidaa became the secular alternative to the powerful Ennahda party that dominated Tunisian politics after Ben Ali’s ouster. But it was largely viewed by the youth who spearheaded the uprising as an extension of the old regime.
With Tunisia limping from one crisis to the next amid divisive debates about the role of Islamic law in the constitution, a desire for unity and stability had begun to spread just in time for Nidaa’s veteran candidate to enter the 2014 presidential race.
Essebsi defeated incumbent Moncef Marzouki to become head of state at the age of 88.
‘Martyrs of Tunisia’
He sought to quash concerns of his close affiliations with Ben Ali or the influence of Bourguiba by saying that he was dedicating the win to the “martyrs of Tunisia,” and that he would be a president to all.
“Bringing back stability and security was his priority, and he sacrificed to this goal everything else -- including economic reforms, the implementation of the constitution and probably the future of the party he created,” said political analyst Riccardo Fabiani.
But that promise to unify a polarized nation proved difficult to achieve.
Tunisia found itself pulled in a tug-of-war between moderate Islamists, harder-line Salafi Muslims and staunch secularists.
Constitutional Debates
That battle played out in the constitutional debates, as well as in parliament and in nine consecutive governments. Mired in political bickering and hammered by powerful labor unions demanding more money from a nation whose economy was sputtering, those governments were able to accomplish little.
Essebsi was caught in the middle, unable to appease or offer more than exhortations that Tunisia’s success with a democratic experiment was the model for the Arab Spring.
Adding to the litany of ills he and the nation faced was a spate of militant attacks in 2015 that targeted and battered the vital tourism sector.
Even on June 27, when he was first admitted to a military hospital for several days, twin suicide bombings struck the capital, showing Tunisia’s gains in stability could easily be reversed.
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