Tunis hosted Sunday by thousands of supporters after an exile of 20 years, the Islamist Rachid Ghannouchi said he would not run in the first presidential election after Tunisia's Ben Ali, the former president who had rolled his movement.
"I'm not going for the presidency, and there will be no (candidate) member of al-Nahda," said the leader of the Islamist movement, in an interview with AFP at his brother's home in northern Tunis.
It is, however, remained vague about the involvement of al-Nahda laws, which should theoretically be organized, as the presidential election, within about six months.
"After 20 years of absence, my party is not ready to play a role in the political arena, the priority is to rebuild Ennahda," he said.
His training, which is prohibited under the reign of Ben Ali, was crushed in the 90s, some 30,000 of its members or presumed supporters arrested, while hundreds more were forced into exile.
He did not exclude a possible participation in the transition team was set up after the flight of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, after four weeks of an unprecedented revolt to which the Islamists have mostly attended by spectators.
"If we feel that the government meets the expectations of those who took part in this revolution, so why not?" He said.
This is the first time that the Islamist leader address from Tunisian soil, a message of openness to the transitional government, which will meet in the coming days to demand legalization of Ennahda.
From his exile in London, the old leader, 69, had remained very cautious, often leaving it up to his spokesman in France or Tunis to convey its message.
At Tunis airport, Rached Ghannouchi was greeted by a packed crowd who sang the national anthem and shouted his "pride Islamic recovered.
"Allah Akbar" (God is greatest), "he told the crowd, smiling, arms outstretched into the sky, before being swept away by a wave of militants, while defenders of secularism expressed their concerns about a return of "obscurantism".
Sunday morning, Ghannouchi had yet held reassuring: "Sharia (Islamic law) has no place in Tunisia" and "fear is only based on ignorance" - which he attributes to the policy of demonization of his movement by Ben Ali.
Rached Ghannouchi founded in 1981 Nahda (Renaissance) with intellectuals inspired by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood.He said today represent a moderate form of Islam close to the AKP in Turkey.
Tolerated at the beginning of the era Ben Ali in 1987, his movement had been suppressed after the general election of 1989, where he supported the lists had received at least 17% of the vote.
Ghannouchi was then left Tunisia to Algeria, then London.In 1992 he was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment for plotting against the president.
A penalty on Tunisian soil, the significance of his return is debatable.
For Mohammed Habib Azizi, a professor of history at the University of Tunis, "what happened in Tunisia in no way be taken as the work of Islamists, nationalists and communists," he told AFP.
At the airport, a union of 37 years, Mohammed Mahfoud, however had drawn up a sign on the "contribution" of al-Nahda in the "struggle against dictatorship," with the number of prisoners, exiles and martyrs ".
