Tunisia president Kais Saied suspends parliament as Covid fuels unrest

Tunisian President Kais Saied fired his prime minister and suspended parliament, a move that critics assailed as threatening to derail the only surviving democracy to have emerged from the Arab Spring.
 

Saied took action late Sunday after masses of largely young people demonstrated in the capital, Tunis, and other cities calling for the fall of the government and railing against hardships caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The moderate Islamist Ennahda party, which is the dominant force in parliament, accused him of carrying out a coup.

The stakes are huge for the North African nation, where the 2011 revolution that unseated the