Brussels, 18/01/2011 (Agence Europe) - The slowness of the announcement of the expulsion of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and his party, the Constitutional Democratic Assembly (RCD), from the Socialist International has added a little more fuel to the controversy over the support the ousted Tunisian president had in the European Parliament (EP).
The leader of the Socialist and Democratic (S&D) Group in the Parliament put the cat among the pigeons when, on Tuesday 18 January, on the sidelines of the EP plenary session in Strasbourg, he confirmed that the RCD had, the previous day, been expelled from the Socialist International of which it had been a member since the 1970s. “A decision has been taken … to cease the membership of the Constitutional Democratic Assembly (RCD) of Tunisia. This decision, in extraordinary circumstances, reflects the values and principles which define our movement and the position of the developments in that country,” the Socialist International says on its website.
Officially a left-wing party, the Tunisian RCD did not have an exclusive relationship with the Socialist International; it was also recognised on the right of the EP spectrum. In June 2009, Ben Ali's party signed a Euro-Mediterranean cooperation agreement with the European People's Party (EPP), which contains the Conservative parties in Europe. This agreement made provision for political discussions on projects, such as the Union for the Mediterranean, Italian MEP Mario Mauro said on Tuesday.
Cohn-Bendit slams EP's do-nothing approach. Having failed to get a vote this week on a Parliament resolution on the situation in Tunisia, on Tuesday, Greens joint leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit railed against the lack of reaction from his colleagues. “Yesterday I was ashamed to be a member of the Parliament, ashamed of an assembly that was unable to react to an extraordinary situation. We are witnessing something unthinkable, a secular freedom movement which, in a matter of weeks, has brought a dictatorship crashing down,” he told the press, condemning the refusal of the EPP and S&D Groups to hold a debate on Tunisia over the last few months. (E.H./transl.rt)