UGTT leader Houcine Abbassi, 2012. Image credit: Paul Rosenfeld, Tunisia Live
This morning, Tunisia’s largest union, a key political broker, rejected the governing Ennahdha party’s response to a proposal for direct talks between opposing political actors, calling the party’s acceptance insufficient.
“It’s an acceptance that we refuse, since it did not contain any clear response to the majority of the mentioned points in the roadmap we proposed,” said Houcine Abbassi, secretary general of the UGTT labor union in a press conference early Saturday.
Ennahdha issued a response Saturday expressing surprise at the union’s statement, saying they had accepted the roadmap, issued Tuesday by the UGTT and three other groups, in full. They said Abbassi’s comments reflect an attempt on behalf of the union and its civil society partners to hold Ennahdha responsible for the failure of talks aiming to end the two-month political crisis.
On Thursday, Ennahdha had released a statement accepting the union’s roadmap, which sets a three week deadline for the government’s resignation after talks begin. In a short release, Ennahdha accepted the plan broadly, but did not address its individual clauses.
The opposition coalition the National Salvation Front accepted the union’s roadmap late on Friday. The two sides seemed poised to start talks before the union’s statement’s today.
Farah Samti contributed reporting.
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