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In a protest set for August 21, Tunisia’s General Labour Union (UGTT) will protest against President Kais Saied.

In response to a three-day UGTT transport strike that ended in July, the union demanded a protest against what it claims are government efforts to undermine workers’ rights and intimidation.

Saied has radically undermined the functions of the parliament and political parties since taking office on July 25, 2021, while granting himself significantly more authority through a constitution that had been revised in accordance with his edicts.

However, according to analysts, the UGTT’s capacity to mobilize its tens of thousands of members is one of only a few remaining Saied counters.

According to Hamza Meddeb of the Carnegie Institute, who has written extensively about the organization, “The UGTT has always been more than just a trade union.”

He praised Tunisia’s independence from France in 1956, noting that it had a significant role in doing so even before Tunisian independence.

According to Meddeb, the UGTT and three other civil society organizations have contributed to a political crisis in which Tunisia’s post-revolutionary democracy was ultimately destroyed by its role, both economically and politically, as it did in 2015, when it was the driving force behind the National Dialogue.

Unavoidable conflict

After a three-day transport strike in late July caused much of the nation to become ill, hundreds of Saied’s supporters staged a rally outside UGTT headquarters on August 7 to protest its accusations of “corruption” and “squandering people’s money.”

Saied defended the anti-union protesters the following night, reiterating their demands for “accountability” and stating that, in contrast to those made by the UGTT and other rights organizations, his supporters had not intended to use violence.

In a video posted on the presidency’s official Facebook page, Saied stated that “there are files that must be opened because the people are demanding accountability.”

Many analysts criticize what they claim is a union that has been undermined by internal conflicts and the threat to its decades-long monopoly on union power in Tunisia. However, many analysts believe that the president and the union will have to face more confrontations.

Under the condition of anonymity, a political analyst who remained in Tunisia told Al Jazeera, “For the past two years, the UGTT has been silent, certainly on the political side of things.”

They claimed that the May decision to change laws, which had had an impact on many UGTT members, “said even to revised the labor code without consulting them.”

Making a decision on that scale without the UGTT would have previously been impossible, he claimed.

A union that is weakened

The UGTT’s relatively low profile is largely due to an internal conflict, which is said to have split the union’s membership and undermined it as a result of its decision in 2021 to increase its board’s mandate by two to three terms.

The UGTT’s decision, according to Meddeb, “has really weakened the board’s decision to do anything,” according to Meddeb.

You can’t ignore the fact that the country’s financial situation is getting worse, which means that the state-dependent middle class, which is the core group of the union, is also suffering, and they are also blaming a board for it, too.

Therefore, Meddeb said, “the majority of its members make sense when Saied calls it a “corrupt union”.”

Saied said it was also simple for him to portray Tunisia as a member of the elite that had been oppressing its citizens because of its long history and close ties with all of Tunisia’s former governments.

A rival union emerges.

Already taking root at the UGTT’s base is being pursued.

The government made a statement on Monday halting the long-standing practice of allowing union officials to receive their government salaries while engaged in union business, with the addition of additional measures anticipated.

Saied is also said to be supporting the rival Union of Tunisians (UTT), which analysts and author Hatem Nafti claim may attempt to exploit any weakening of the UGTT’s relationship with its members to improve its standing.

It’s still unclear how successful that would be given the UTT leadership’s prior corruption convictions, he continued.

Last week, the UTT made it abundantly clear that it was ready to take any responsibility for the UGTT’s actions when it publicly accused its rivals of what it called the “defamation” of the president.

Nafti claimed that the government might also pursue a stop to the practice of deducting state employees’ salaries at source before transferring the funds to the union, giving UTT more chance of attracting members away from UGTT.

Nafti told Al Jazeera from Paris, where he currently resides, that Kais Saied would oppose the UGTT was written from the beginning.

Populism prohibits the use of a mediator between the leader and the populace, so he first removed the opposition’s political parties, then civil society, and the media.

He claimed that even the television networks that support him no longer broadcast political programs.