At Ennahda’s 10^th convention held last week, Rashed Al-Ghanooshi won a new four-year term as head of the Islamist party, although some of the conventioneers voted for other candidates.

The elections reflected wide agreement on the historical leader of the movement, yet backstage, a conflict for leadership within party began to surface.

At Ennahda’s 10^th convention held last week, Rashed Al-Ghanooshi won a new four-year term as head of the Islamist party, although some of the conventioneers voted for other candidates.

The elections reflected wide agreement on the historical leader of the movement, yet backstage, a conflict for leadership within party began to surface.

Abdulhameed Al-Jalasi and Abdullatif Al-Makki, Ennahda leaders who had been imprisoned under the ousted regime, were in an open electoral battle against Al-Ghanouchi to reduce his role and his powers. However, with the help of party allies, Al-Ghanochi managed to foil their aims and expand his powers.

Driven by anger at this faction, Al-Ghanouchi almost withdrew his candidacy, but the process kept him in the race. The opposition to Al-Ghanoouchi acknowledges the necessity of having Al-Ghanouchi at the top of the movement’s leadership; however, it protests the expansion of powers in his hands. It also calls for a balance of power within the movement.

To sum up the proceedings that took place behind closed doors at the Ennahda Movement Convention, the movement leader and former Minister of Health, Abdullatif Al-Makki gave a statement to the press in which he said: “We want a movement with a leader, not a leader with a movement.”

These statements reflect the anxiety that some Ennahda movement leaders as they see Al-Ghanouchi excluding others from leadership and practicing control over all the party structures because of his expanding powers.

Al-Ghanouchi supporters view him as an irreplaceable man in a movement that has succeeded in maintaining a strong presence in the Tunisian political equation. At the same time, the opposition criticizes Al-Ghanouchi for not taking vigorous action towards reform and democracy.

Observers say that the internal conflict that surfaced at the convention revolves around Al-Ghanouchi as the leader who will plan and execute, rather than the movement policies themselves.

The disputes in the movement appeared at the convention when two leading Ennahda figures – Samir Dilo and Amer Al-Areed of the reformist wing – boycotted the elections.

The ideologically and structurally coherent movement has never suffered this sort of dispute in the past; and this precedent today revolves around Al-Ghanouchi, who is described by some as the movement’s financial vain and political mastermind.

According to the analyst and media figure Nabil Al-Shahed, the movement’s tenth convention, “was a referendum on expanding Al-Ghanouchi’s powers. Technically, the convention’s only result was boosting Al-Ghanouchi’s control over the movement’s decision-making institutions. Al-Ghanouchi has practiced this control for 40 years in the past, and today he was elected for four more years with greater powers. Moreover, the convention granted Al-Ghanouchi – as head of the movement- the right to run for higher state offices including the presidency.”

Al-Shahed concluded his analysis, that despite the media talk about the separation of the missionary and political branches, the convention did not change much in the movement, “since no clear mechanisms or guarantees were offered to execute this policy.”

According to Al-Shahed, the party succeeded in diverting attention of its political opponents and the general public opinion from its internal problems to the issue of separating the missionary and political branches. In addition, the movement passed its financial and ethical report in complete discretion.

On the other side, the leading Ennahda figure Najib Al-Gharbi told Correspondents that the movement had concluded its disputes and boosted its internal cohesion by electing Al-Ghannouchi. Al-Gharbi explained his views with Al-Ghanouchhi’s “moderate policies that boost the parties’ image and push for more openness, in addition to the separation between the missionary and political branches.”

However, the political sociologist Tareq Bilhaj Mohammad views this separation as a “tactical maneuver rather than a strategic shift in Ennahda’s discourse and its social, cultural and ideological project.” Bilhaj Mohammad continued: “This maneuver reveals the movement’s political realism as it faces a local, regional and an international difficulties, and it should not be understood as a change in the movement’s aims and convictions. Ennahda’s announcement after the its tenth convention is merely a marketing plan that does not guarantee real change in the product.”

“.