PARIS – Tunisia’s popular Islamist party Ennahdha said on Tuesday it would field no presidential candidate in planned elections and denounced the country’s transition leaders as a government of “exclusion”. The party’s exiled leader Rached Ghannouchi “will not be a candidate, Ennahdha will not have a candidate in the presidential election,” to be held in six months, the party’s Paris-based spokesman Houcine Jaziri told AFP. But he said the party would take part in legislative polls. “There will be no democratic transition without Ennahdha,” he said. “We are available to consult everyone, all the players in political and civil society.” After the ousting of former authoritarian president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali last week, Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi set up a government tasked with steering the north African country to elections in six months. “It is not a government of national unity, it is a government of national exclusion,” Jaziri said. Ghannouchi retained several ministers from Ben Ali’s government in his administration but insisted on Tuesday that they all have “clean hands.” Police in Tunis on Tuesday violently dispersed hundreds of demonstrators led by a former president of Ennahdha, Sadok Chourou, reporters at the scene said.
