To everyone working at Nawaat,
Clarification and solidarity
I have never made a habit of replying to an article or a statement that speaks about me or targets me. The purpose of this friendly handshake is not to denounce or reject what was said in your article of 10 September, despite my fundamental disagreement with some of its content. Rather, I wanted to use this occasion, on the one hand, to set out the nature of my relationship — or more precisely the nature of the relationship that should exist, in my view, between politicians and journalists; and on the other, to help enrich the debate on some of the issues the article raised, which deserve to be discussed seriously and objectively in the public sphere.
If journalists are bound by the principle that "facts are sacred, comment is free" — with all it requires in commitment to reporting the truth with integrity, neutrality, accuracy and objectivity, and to checking the sources of information, together with the freedom to comment, express an opinion, criticise and hold to account — then the role of politicians, especially when they bear the responsibility of governing, is to work to provide a legislative environment that protects freedom of expression, the right of access to information and the confidentiality of sources; a security environment that ensures the physical and moral protection of journalists and toughens the penalties for any assault on them in the course of their work; and a regulatory environment that guarantees the independence of the profession, supports training, and secures fair pay and stable contracts.
At the same time, when politicians are questioned or criticised, they must answer and convince with conclusive evidence and proof, through the force of argument — not through the argument of force, by hounding journalists, repressing them and turning the courts against them. This is not a passing courtesy towards a media outlet that criticised me; it is, in my judgement, the essential difference between those who see the press as a counter-power necessary to the health of the State, and those who see it as an adversary to be tamed.
Where I disagree
Your article contained readings and interpretations I do not share, such as the claim that I "want to take the State back from Saied more than I want to rebuild it." All my recent statements — and the videos are available on my page and online — confirm my wish to develop the concept of the State in step with the times and with the needs of Tunisians. I am not nostalgic for a State that has passed, and I am not offering Tunisians a restored copy of the past. The State I speak of is not one in which power is exercised without limits, but one in which power is bounded by clear limits: an independent judiciary whose judges are neither transferred by decision nor dismissed by decree; an administration that serves the citizen, not the ruler; constitutional bodies whose decisions are enforced, rather than picked over for those that suit those in power; and media that need no permission to ask questions.
Your article paused on a pertinent observation: "a statesman is not necessarily a democrat," and a highly disciplined State can be a highly authoritarian one. I adopt that observation and do not dispute it, because it is precisely the lesson Tunisia has paid for twice. That is why I say clearly: the authority of the State is not the authority of the ruler, and it is legitimate only when its limits are defined, when it is known to whom it is answerable and which rights it may not override. A strong State is not one its citizens fear, but one in which the citizen finds protection from arbitrary power — including its own.
As for the hardest question you raised — has my view of the State changed, or only my place within it? — I do not evade it, nor do I consider it unfair. Here I distinguish, as you did in your article, between criminal responsibility, which is established not by affiliation but by evidence before an independent judge, and political responsibility, which concerns, to varying degrees, everyone who took part in running a given period. The second kind I neither deny nor hide from; in my judgement it is not measured by a statement or a symbolic apology, but by positions, programmes and practice. Anyone who wishes to hold me to account for it is entitled to do so, provided the accounting is not selective: a country that decides that anyone who served the State before 2011 is unfit to serve it today has condemned whole generations of its officials, judges, doctors, academics and diplomats to civil death. And that same logic — the logic of branding people traitors, of exclusion and of pre-emptive labelling — is what brought us to where we are.
The questions and the road
Your article raised many questions about the credibility of the ideas, convictions and programmes I am putting before Tunisians. Journalists, like researchers, critics and intellectuals, seek the truth, ask questions and build hypotheses. Politicians — and this is my role and my duty too — must persevere and strive to convince until doubts are dispelled, for words need deeds and facts to confirm them. Here I recall the famous and telling line of the Spanish poet Antonio Machado: "Traveller, there is no road; the road is made by walking."
So watch the road closely, and the verdict will then be more accurate and more objective. Watch it in positions, not in promises; in moments of trial, not in moments of rhetoric. I do not ask you for trust in advance, nor do I hope for any softening of criticism; I ask only that criticism remain open to me as it is to others, today and tomorrow, in opposition and in office, should Tunisians so wish. For a politician who can bear criticism out of power but cannot bear it in power never could bear it.
Solidarity
I wish on this occasion to express my solidarity with all of Nawaat's journalists following the recent assault on the team. What the National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists has called for — an end to the targeting of journalists, and an urgent judicial investigation and an administrative inquiry into the matter — is the minimum that a State governed by the rule of law imposes on itself before anyone else imposes it.
Here I call to mind, without distinction or selection, Zied El Heni, sentenced to a year in prison over an opinion he expressed, and Borhen Bsaies and Mourad Zeghidi, imprisoned on 22 May 2024 under Decree 54 before facing sentences of three and a half years. Nor may we forget what Mohamed Boughalleb endured, who spent eleven months behind bars and came out in poor health, or what Sonia Dahmani suffered, who spent more than eighteen months in prison before a conditional release in November 2025. And the arrest of the prominent journalist Mohamed Yousfi on 4 September, followed by a detention order on baseless charges, is but a new episode in the repression of free voices that refused to let an entire people be mistreated amid complicity and silence… Solidarity that stops at those we agree with is not solidarity; it is a calculation of interests.
A final word on the lesson of history
The dynamics of history do not run backwards. Tunisia is not going back to before 2011, nor to before 25 July 2021. Tunisians have learned things that are not forgotten: they have learned to ask, to protest and to hold to account. What retreats is not history but freedoms, when no one defends them. That is why the way out of this period will be neither a return to the past nor revenge on the present, but the building anew of a State in which competence is the criterion, the law is a ceiling over the ruler before the ruled, and a free press is part of the State's immune system rather than a threat to it.
Full support to the opinion journalism you represent, and to all the journalists unjustly held in prison.
May you remain in the service of the free word.
Mondher Zenaidi