Tunisia’s influential UGTT trade union announced on Friday that it will launch a nationwide strike on January 21 its first since President Kais Saied assumed sweeping powers to demand wage negotiations and protest what it describes as an escalating assault on critics and civil liberties.
The planned strike is expected to disrupt major public sectors and place further pressure on a government already grappling with severe financial strain. With public services deteriorating and frustration mounting across the country, the move risks igniting broader social unrest.
Saied dissolved parliament in 2021 and began ruling by decree, arguing that the extraordinary actions were necessary to combat corruption and restore stability. Opposition parties, however, condemned the move as a coup and warn that Tunisia is slipping back into authoritarian rule.
The million-member UGTT said Tunisia’s political and economic situation is rapidly worsening and accused Saied of attempting to silence dissent and dismantle democratic institutions.
“We are not intimidated by your threats or your prisons. We do not fear jail … We will continue our struggle,” UGTT Secretary General Nourredine Taboubi declared on Thursday after a union-led protest.
The strike call underscores growing anger over shrinking freedoms and Saied’s widening crackdown on opposition leaders, journalists, and civil society organizations, all amid a deepening cost-of-living crisis that has pushed many Tunisians to the edge.
Rights groups say that since 2021, Saied has sidelined political parties, weakened independent institutions, jailed prominent opposition figures, and concentrated power over the judiciary. Saied denies interfering in judicial affairs, insisting that all are subject to the law.
The UGTT, long a central force in Tunisia’s democratic transition following the 2011 revolution, initially backed Saied’s dissolution of parliament but later broke with him, criticizing his subsequent actions as an attempt to cement one-man rule.
