From gloomy forebodings in Tunisia to a – literally – toxic relationship to secret police offices – This is what the continent has been talking about this week.

In today’s special supplement on the Turkish election, we get acquainted with the “Turkish Gandhi”, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, Erdoğan’s contender in the next general election of the country.

Arab winter is coming

Last week, 81-year-old Rached Ghannouchi, former president of the Parliament of Tunisia, had just gathered his family to end the fast imposed by Ramadan when around 100 elements of the security forces burst into his home. It is immediately evident to everyone that they intend to arrest him. What is less so is what the agents are looking for as they ransack his residence, searching it from top to bottom. Perhaps they want to find evidence of the plot they already suspect. The same motivates his transfer to a military facility in the capital.

What is Rachid Ghannouchi guilty of? In a meeting with members of the National Salvation Front (NSF), the main opposition coalition to the authoritarian President Saied, he dared to assert the following: ‘The removal of political Islam is a civil war project’.

These words earned him the charge of ‘conspiracy against state security’ based on Articles 68 and 72 of the Tunisian penal code. But the evening is not over yet. While his daughter Yousra raises the alarm and takes action to bring the news of her father’s arrest to the media’s attention, the homes of her sister and other officials of the moderate Islamist party Ennahda are also searched. Three of them end up in handcuffs.

The police also raided the headquarters of the political organisation. They do not have a search warrant to justify the raid but declare the office closed for at least three days. The next day, the police forbid rallies among the opposition forces; they prevent the party from holding a press conference on the arrest of its leader. President Saied intervenes, declaring that the country is engaged in a ‘ruthless war against those who seek to undermine the state and its institutions. Now elderly and ill, Ghannouchi risks long imprisonment, if not the death penalty. Welcome to Tunisia.

In Tunis, there is a strange air of expectation in these hours. It is usually the one that precedes significant turning points. On the other hand, many are betting that things cannot go on much longer at this rate. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank do not trust Saied, and one can understand them: every day that passes increases the risk that a country with 80% of its GDP in debt will default. It would be chaos. The rush to leave the country would accelerate at an alarming rate. With summer on the horizon, Italy sees the possibility of a black swan on the immigration front. The U.S. maintain an intransigent line towards an unreliable interlocutor. Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani worries that Tunisia would be ready to join the BRICS, the group of emerging economies to which Moscow and Beijing belong, as well as Brazil, India and South Africa. It would be a geopolitical landing place unwelcome to the West.

Meanwhile, the same West is proceeding with a massive “get out” plan from Sudan. In 1994 the international community was able to evacuate their staff from Rwanda, turning blind to what was happening in the country. We all know what happened afterwards, but the memory is short. Brace yourself. Arab winter is coming.

Toxic relationship

More than a piece of news, this is a story that needs to be told to understand why the U.S. and China are more and more at the antipodes, where “disagreements” (to be polite) on Taiwan and Russia’s war are just the tip of the iceberg of a more profoundly rooted, hybrid conflict between the two superpowers. Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department imposed sanctions against two Chinese companies and four Chinese citizens for their role in fuelling the U.S. opioid overdose epidemic.

For those of you needing some context: since 2000, more than a million people (yes, six zeros) in the United States have died of drug overdoses, most of which were due to opioids. Over 1500 per week die from taking some opioids in the country. In recent years, the lion’s share has been fentanyl, a synthetic opioid fifty times more potent than heroin. Walking in downtown cities like San Francisco seems to be an in-real-world re-presentation of Resident Evil.

How did we get there? The problem started with the over-prescription of legal pain medications. Still, it has intensified recently due to influxes of cheap heroin and synthetic opioids, including fentanyl, supplied by foreign drug cartels and produced – among other countries – in… China. U.S. President Joe Biden (who plans to seek a second term) urged Beijing multiple times to address the problem of the production and trafficking of synthetic drugs without success. On the other hand, China is pointing the (middle) finger at U.S. regulatory failures as the root cause of its drug problems.

Hybrid warfare is at its best of the worst.

All eyes on me

And then, to cap it all… why don’t we install illegal secret police outposts on U.S. soil? China already had this excellent idea. Hear, hear: US prosecutors have arrested two men in New York for operating a Chinese “secret police station” in Manhattan’s Chinatown neighbourhood. That same day, the Department of Justice charged 44 individuals — including 40 MPS personnel and two officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China — with “transnational repression offences targeting U.S. residents.” The stations are believed to be among at least 100 operating globally in 53 countries, including the UK and the Netherlands. News like this is just one element of China’s increasingly ambitious efforts to silence overseas critics towards the ruling Communist Party and place covert Ministry of Public Security officials in major cities worldwide. Also, it highlights Western countries’ difficulties in preventing such violations of sovereignty, posing considerable risks to national security, sometimes in circumvention of export restrictions.

Icing on the cake, back on the Old Continent Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, questioned the independence of all former Soviet states under international law. Surprise, surprise, President Macron!

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I am starting to regret the good old times of the balloon saga.

Diplo focus: Turkish election

On 14th May, at stake is not only an election but also political and cultural hegemony over a country. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan now knows the name of his contender in the most hotly contested and uncertain election in his 20-year rule: Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu.

Nicknamed the “Turkish Gandhi” for his slight build and humble style, the so-called “Table of Six” coalition officially picked him as their joint candidate in March. His profile is the classic profile of someone who knows the wheels of politics and the State inside out: chief of the centre-left Republican People’s Party (CHP) for over a decade, the 74-year-old is also a former bureaucrat from the country’s social security authority.

Although Kılıçdaroğlu’s personality, charisma and political heritage may not seem to pose a real threat to Erdoğan’s undisputed grip on the country, The Reis has never been more vulnerable since his first election in 2003. A major cost-of-living crisis, double-digit inflation and a belated response to the devastating earthquakes that killed tens of thousands in February are putting Turkey’s 85 million people under pressure and jeopardising The Reis’ foreign policydoctrine (known under the name of ‘Blue Homeland’).

The election’s outcome will be keenly watched as observers seek to determine whether Erdoğan — who is walking a tricky political tightrope over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — will push the country in an even more traditionalist, religiously conservative direction or whether a new leader will be able to reset damaged relations with the West, strengthen NATO’s block, and bring the country back to the negotiating table for EU membership.