Tunisian president and candidate for re-election Kais Saied joins his supporters after the announcement of the provisional outcomes for the presidential elections, within the capital Tunis, Tunisia, Sunday.
Anis Mili/AP
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Anis Mili/AP
TUNIS, Tunisia — President Kais Saied received a landslide victory in Tunisia’s election Monday, maintaining his grip on energy after a primary time period through which opponents had been imprisoned and the nation’s establishments overhauled to provide him extra authority.
The North African nation’s Unbiased Excessive Authority for Elections mentioned Saied obtained 90.7% of the vote, a day after exit polls confirmed him with an insurmountable lead within the nation generally known as the birthplace of the Arab Spring greater than a decade in the past.
“We’ll cleanse the nation of all of the corrupt and schemers,” the 66-year-old populist mentioned in a speech at marketing campaign headquarters. He pledged to defend Tunisia towards threats international and home.
That raised alarm among the many president’s critics together with College of Tunis legislation professor Sghayer Zakraoui, who mentioned Tunisian politics had been as soon as once more about “absolutely the energy of a single man who locations himself above everybody else and believes himself to be invested with a messianic message.”
Zakraoui mentioned the election outcomes had been paying homage to Tunisia beneath President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who dominated for greater than 20 years earlier than changing into the primary dictator toppled within the Arab Spring uprisings. Saied obtained a bigger vote share than Ben Ali did in 2009, two years earlier than fleeing the nation amid protests.
The closest challenger, businessman Ayachi Zammel, received 7.4% of the vote after sitting in jail for almost all of the marketing campaign whereas going through a number of sentences for election-related crimes.
But Saied’s win was marred by low voter turnout. Election officers reported 28.8% of voters participated on Oct. 6 — a considerably smaller displaying than within the first spherical of the nation’s two different post-Arab Spring elections and a sign of apathy plaguing the nation’s 9.7 million eligible voters.
Saied’s most distinguished challengers — imprisoned since final yr — had been prevented from working, and lesser-known candidates had been jailed or stored off the poll. Opposition events boycotted the competition, calling it a sham amid Tunisia’s deteriorating political local weather and authoritarian drift.
Over the weekend, there was little signal of an election underway in Tunisia aside from an anti-Saied protest on Friday and celebrations within the capital on Sunday night.
“He’ll re-enter workplace undermined reasonably than empowered by these elections,” Tarek Megerisi, a senior coverage fellow on the European Council on Overseas Relations, wrote on X.
Saied’s critics pledged to maintain opposing his rule.
“It is doable that after 20 years our children will protest on Avenue Habib Bourguiba to inform him to get out,” mentioned Amri Sofien, a contract filmmaker, referring to the capital’s primary thoroughfare. “There isn’t a hope on this nation.”
Such despair is a far cry from the Tunisia of 2011, when protesters took to the streets demanding “bread, freedom and dignity,” ousted the president and paved the best way for the nation’s transition right into a multiparty democracy.
Tunisia within the following years enshrined a brand new structure, created a Reality and Dignity Fee to carry justice to residents tortured beneath the previous regime and noticed its main civil society teams win the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering political compromise.
However its new leaders had been unable to buoy the nation’s flailing financial system and rapidly grew to become unpopular amid fixed political infighting and episodes of terrorism and political violence.
In opposition to that backdrop, Saied — then a political outsider — received his first time period in 2019 promising to fight corruption. To the satisfaction of his supporters, in 2021 he declared a state of emergency, suspended parliament and rewrote the structure to consolidate the ability of the presidency — a collection of actions his critics likened to a coup.
Tunisians in a referendum permitted the president’s proposed structure a yr later, though voter turnout plummeted.
Authorities subsequently started to unleash a wave of repression on the once-vibrant civil society. In 2023, a few of Saied’s most distinguished opponents from throughout the political spectrum had been thrown in jail, together with right-wing chief Abir Moussi and Islamist Rached Ghannouchi, the co-founder of the social gathering Ennahda and former speaker of Tunisia’s parliament.
Dozens of others had been imprisoned on fees together with inciting dysfunction, undermining state safety and violating a controversial anti-fake information legislation critics say has been used to stifle dissent.
The tempo of the arrests picked up earlier this yr, when authorities started concentrating on further attorneys, journalists, activists, migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and the previous head of the post-Arab Spring Reality and Dignity Fee.
“The authorities appeared to see subversion in every single place,” mentioned Michael Ayari, senior analyst for Algeria & Tunisia on the Worldwide Disaster Group.
Dozens of candidates had expressed curiosity in difficult the president, and 17 submitted preliminary paperwork to run in Sunday’s race. Nonetheless, members of the election fee permitted solely three.
The position of the fee and its members, all of them appointed by the president beneath his new structure, got here beneath scrutiny. They defied court docket rulings ordering them to reinstate three candidates that they had rejected. The parliament subsequently handed a legislation stripping energy from the executive courts.
Such strikes sparked worldwide concern, together with from Europe, which depends on partnership with Tunisia to police the central Mediterranean, the place migrants try to cross in from North Africa to Europe.
European Fee Overseas Affairs spokeswoman Nabila Massrali mentioned Monday the EU “takes word of the place expressed by many Tunisian social and political actors relating to the integrity of the electoral course of.”
