Mohamed Ghannouchi Mohamed Ghannouchi Mohamed Ghannouchi ( "Muhammad Al-Ghannushi"; born 18 August 1941) is a Tunisian politician who was Prime Minister of Tunisia from 1999 to 2011. Regarded as a technocrat, Ghannouchi was a long-standing figure in the Tunisian government under President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. After Ben Ali's ousting in the 2011 Tunisian Revolution, he remained Prime Minister for six weeks before stepping down. Ghannouchi was a member of the Tunisian parliament for the Democratic Constitutional Rally. He was Minister of Finance from 1989 to 1992. From 1992 to 1999, he served as Minister of International Co-operation and Foreign Investment,
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali candidates were required to get endorsements from 30 political figures. Given the RCD's near-absolute dominance of the political scene, prospective opposition candidates discovered they couldn't get their nomination papers signed. The subsequent years saw the return of several Bourguiba-era restrictions. For many years, the press had been expected to practice self-censorship, but this increasingly gave way to official censorship. Amendments to the press code allowed the Interior Ministry to review all newspaper and magazine articles before publication. In 1992, the president's older brother Habib Ben Ali was tried in absentia in France for laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, in