The FNDU brings together the main opposition movements in Mauritania.
“The best way to address the extremist speech is not to organize a popular demonstration” the FNDU said in a statement, arguing that it is necessary “to affirm a strong political will and fast-track the elaboration of a consensual societal project which diagnoses the injustices which undermine our society and finds adequate solutions.”
The FNDU warned that “the ruling majority will never succeed in having Mauritanians believe that it will achieve its goal, thanks to an improvised march in the last days of its mandate, something it has not achieved during ten years in power.”
It added that “no-one can ask the FNDU to participate in a demonstration in which it has not been associated with from the start, considering that there are a number of unanswered questions about the timing of the march, its real motives and purposes, its real targets and whether it is meant to bring together or divide.”
The so-called “hard-line” opposition also expressed surprise about “this late interest in national unity on the part of a ruling UPR that is on the last days of its rule, after spending more than a decade in power, without any plan for a united society, to consolidate national unity and strengthen social cohesion.”
It noted that the current dispensation “has exacerbated the injustice, exclusion and marginalization suffered by large fringes” of Mauritanian society, “as well as inequity in the distribution of national resources and public jobs.”