A poster for President Kais Saied on a building last month in Tunis. The president’s election opponents have largely either been jailed or disqualified.
Credit...Anis Mili/Associated Press

Tunisia’s Autocratic Leader Is Poised to Steamroll to Election Victory

President Kais Saied, who has jailed opponents and consolidated power, is almost certain to win Sunday’s election in the North African country, the birthplace of the Arab Spring movement.

by · NY Times

For many Tunisians, there seems to be little point to the presidential election on Sunday. There are barely any candidate posters, no debates and not much suspense. The president, Kais Saied, appears so sure of victory that he has not even issued any policy proposals.

His leading challenger is in prison, serving three separate sentences on what his lawyers say are falsified charges, the longest sentence lasting 12 years. At least eight other would-be candidates are in jail or under a form of house arrest, and others have been disqualified from the ballot.

More than a decade after mass protests toppled the country’s longtime dictator, Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali, prompting other Arab Spring revolts across the Middle East, few in Tunisia still believe they live in a democracy. The string of punishments for the president’s critics and his ever-tightening hold over the election process in recent months have left little doubt that Mr. Saied’s one-man rule is here to stay.

“He’s willing to do anything it takes to stay in power — dividing Tunisians, prosecuting them, accusing them,” said Souhaib Fercheche, 30, a senior campaigner at I Watch, a civic watchdog formed by young Tunisians in the heady, hopeful days after the country’s 2011 revolution.

The protests that year ushered in a decade of embryonic democracy for Tunisia. To outsiders especially, it was the only success story to emerge from the Arab Spring. But Tunisians who had demanded better opportunities and a cleaned-up government never received what they thought democracy had promised.

The transition was corroded by political divisions and the perception that police officers and businesspeople associated with the old regime’s abuses were getting away with their crimes. Neglected, the economy atrophied, leaving many poor and middle-class people worse off than before.

That left high expectations for Mr. Saied, a constitutional law professor whom many saw as incorruptible, and who was elected in a landslide in 2019. When he suspended the country’s powerful Parliament and established one-man rule nearly two years later, many Tunisians celebrated in the streets.

“There had been 10 years of failure, so Kais Saied seemed like an alternative, a savior,” said Lamia Farhani, a lawyer in Tunis, the capital, whose brother Anis was shot by the police while protesting against Mr. Ben Ali in 2011.

But three years after what many Tunisians now refer to as Mr. Saied’s coup, the country’s tentative post-revolution gains have nearly all evaporated. The police once again largely operate with impunity, and slow-moving efforts to reckon with the crimes of the Ben Ali era have stalled. Free speech is constrained, and economic misery has only worsened, with shortages of everything from sugar, coffee, milk and bread to car parts.

“He didn’t do anything,” Ms. Farhani said. “He tricked and cheated us and betrayed the will of the people.”

At first, Mr. Saied’s personal popularity insulated him from much blame for the economy’s dire state and other problems — that, and Tunisians’ contempt for the weak, divided opposition. But polls and interviews have shown him bleeding support over the past two years, and turnout for the election is likely to be low. A final result is set to be declared on Wednesday.

Mr. Saied frequently blames Tunisia’s problems on shadowy domestic and foreign forces that he says are conspiring against the country, pitting himself against opponents with rhetoric that boils down to “you’re with us or you’re against us,” as Tarek Kahlaoui, a Tunisian political analyst, put it.

Opponents say such conspiratorial claims only distract from Mr. Saied’s growing authoritarianism.

The once-lively Parliament is now little more than a rubber stamp for the president.

And Mr. Saied has also unilaterally abolished the independent authority that once oversaw the country’s judges. That left them under the thumb of Mr. Saied’s Justice Ministry, which has repeatedly fired, demoted or forcibly transferred judges who have resisted convicting the president’s critics or otherwise shown independence.

When an administrative court found that three of the candidates disqualified from Sunday’s ballot should be allowed to run, the commission that oversees elections simply ignored the ruling. Before long, the debate was moot: The Parliament soon stripped the court of its jurisdiction over electoral matters anyway.

An electoral commission spokesman, Mohamed Tlili Mansri, said in a statement that it treated all candidates equally, following the law, and that it had accredited more than 15,000 monitors, journalists and campaign representatives to observe the elections. But it was not clear who was among them, and Mr. Fercheche of the I Watch election watchdog noted that the electoral commission had barred leading mainstream civil society groups, including his, from that effort.

The period after the revolution “wasn’t perfect, but we had the space to hold people accountable, fight back and discuss public policies,” Mr. Fercheche said. “But now I think we’re in a dictatorship. And if the president wins, it’s five more years of dictatorship.”

Freedom of expression is often the only thing Tunisians name when asked whether the revolution produced anything good. In the post-revolution years, independent media flourished, and ordinary Tunisians flung social-media mud at their leaders in a way that would be unthinkable in the rest of the Arab world.

Now, only a few media outlets still dare to publish or broadcast criticism of the president. Rights groups say hundreds of journalists and others posting on social media have been jailed under a 2022 law that criminalizes spreading “false information and rumors” online. Many interviewed in Tunis last month were far more fearful about speaking to a journalist than Tunisians have been in previous years.

Assia Atrous, 60, a former editor and reporter at Assabah, a venerable Tunisian newspaper, is one of at least a dozen journalists and media commentators who rights groups say received warnings from the electoral commission that they could be prosecuted for their coverage.

Assabah excised the more sensitive parts of a political column she had submitted without telling her, she said, and declined altogether to print another she wrote in support of a jailed journalist. She published it on Facebook instead.

“Now there are no opposition voices, no dialogue at all,” she said. “You have to choose every single word carefully. You don’t know what will be censored, what you can say.”

Among those who feel most betrayed by Mr. Saied are those who believed he would push forward the process of reckoning with abuses committed under the Ben Ali regime, which has been stalled by what its supporters say is the security services’ attempts to dodge accountability.

But the special courts appointed to the task have been almost frozen over the past year, Ms. Farhani and others involved said. Nothing happens in hearings except the judge announcing another postponement. It is unclear whether Mr. Saied has played a direct role in that, but activists and analysts note that he has consistently expressed support for the security services, whose support helps him retain power.

The head of the commission investigating Ben Ali-era abuses, a well-known activist named Sihem Bensedrine, was jailed in August on corruption charges her family and rights groups call bogus.

“Now we’re back to square one,” said Omar Mestiri, 73, Ms. Bensedrine’s husband. “The police rule the country.” He added that the government had not carried out any of the commission’s recommendations for change, including compensating victims and issuing official apologies.

What concerns most ordinary Tunisians above all is the bleakness of everyday life. Poverty has deepened. The state is unable to pay for basic imports and, amid a drought, the taps have been running dry in many areas. Thousands of professionals have left the country, leaving their aging parents alone back home. Others have chosen to risk the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean to Europe by boat.

“Inside each one of us, we’re all so sad,” said Nadia Ben Salem, 40, who works for an international insurance company.

But disappointment with Mr. Saied has not translated into gains for his opponents. Much of the opposition is rallying around Ayachi Zammel, a businessman who qualified as one of the president’s challengers before being imprisoned. But most Tunisians interviewed in Tunis were unenthusiastic about voting at all, either too busy making ends meet or seeing no credible alternative.

“There are no candidates,” Ms. Ben Salem said with a smile, offering a slight exaggeration, before reconsidering: “Only one. He pulled them all out.”

Rania Khaled contributed reporting from Cairo.

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