LOBBYING TRACKER

Tunisia’s Islamist party boosted its US public relations spending almost three-fold last year in an effort to reassure skittish Washington policymakers about its democratic bona fides.

The Ennahda movement, the only Tunisian entity registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, paid Burson-Marsteller (now Burson Cohn & Wolfe, or BCW) almost $285,000 last year, up from $105,000 in 2017. The New York-based global PR firm, which was first hired in 2014, helped provide the party “support on media and stakeholder outreach in advance of upcoming elections,” according to its latest filing. Its list of contacts includes Jason Buntin, the director for Europe and Middle East Affairs at the Office of the US Trade Representative, and Robert Fairweather, the deputy associate director for international affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.

Ennahda (Renaissance in Arabic) was founded in 1981 by current leader Rached Ghannouchi and traces its roots to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the Iranian revolution. In recent years, however, it has sought to shed that image, joining a coalition government with its secular rival Nidaa Tounes in 2015 and rebranding itself as a right-leaning “Muslim Democrat” party the following year.

The party’s evolution has not gone unnoticed by the Counter Extremism Project, an influential nonprofit whose leaders include former Sen. Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn., and former homeland security adviser Frances Townsend. Despite the party’s evolution, the group continues to include Ghannouchi in its database of “terrorists and extremists,” however.

The party first hired Burson-Marsteller in 2014 ahead of the country’s first free legislative elections since independence in 1956, in which Ennahda came in second place behind Nidaa Tounes. The party has also benefited from close ties to the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy, a Washington think tank, whose founder Radwan Masmoudi doubles as Ghannouchi’s adviser on US-Tunisian affairs.

The 2018 PR push came during and after long-delayed municipal elections in which Ennahda was able to capitalize on its decades-old network in both poorer urban neighborhoods and the disenfranchised countryside to come in first place, winning 132 out of 349 mayoral seats. Almost two-thirds of the elected female mayors — 42 out of 68, or 62% — came from Ennahda’s lists, including the first woman elected mayor of the capital, Tunis, Souad Abderrahim.

“Each of our female mayors ran inspiring campaigns, always epitomizing the party’s plurality and embrace of modern values,” Ghannouchi wrote in a July 2018 newsletter distributed by Burson-Marsteller. “It is for this reason that we have no doubt that they will all be effective and tireless representatives of Tunisian people of all political persuasions.”

The Ennahda leader also denounced recent acts of terrorism in the North African country. And he railed against an effort by opposition lawmakers to force the party’s dissolution over its alleged role in the murder of left-wing opposition politicians Chokri Belaid and Mohamed Brahmi in 2013.

“There is no truth in these claims and we completely refute them,” Ghannouchi wrote in a Nov. 26 statement distributed by Burson-Marsteller. “They are pure fabrications by a politicized self-appointed extra-judicial body that is undermining the legal process by continuously seeking to interfere, pressurize and question the integrity of the judiciary, in order to tarnish and demonize a political rival.”

In a show of trust in Tunisia’s democratic transition, the Donald Trump administration has agreed to give the country $335 million worth of financial aid over the next five years, the Tunisian Ministry of Development, Investment and International Cooperation announced late last month. The aid will be financed by the US Agency for International Development.