02/08/2013 10:13
Tunisian union gives government one week to step down
Tunisia's powerful union federation said on Friday that the embattled Islamist-led government had one week to reach a deal for creating a new technocrat government, otherwise it will be "forced to consider" other options, Reuters reported.
The 600,000-strong Tunisian General Labour Union (UGTT) has been trying to mediate between the ruling Ennahda party and the secular opposition, which is demanding the government's ouster as well as the dissolution of a transitional Constituent Assembly that is only weeks away from completing the country's new draft constitution.
Tensions have been rising in Tunisia since the assassination last week of a leftist politician, the second to be slain in six months. Political tensions, along with an outburst of clashes between the army and militants near the Algerian border, risk disrupting the democratic political transition that began after Tunisians toppled an autocratic president in 2011.
The UGTT, seen as being closer to the opposition, has offered a compromise that would put a new technocrat government in place but preserve the Assembly. The transitional body would, however, be put on a sped-up time scale for completing the constitution and the country's new election laws.
"(We) will continue to hold talks and if our demands of changing the government and implementing a time frame for the Constituent Assembly, then we will have other options that we will be forced to consider," the UGTT's deputy leader, Bou Ali Mbarki, told local Nesma TV, without giving further details.