President Kais Said, 66, aspires to be re-elected this Sunday in Tunisia in elections in which victory seems assured after his main rivals have gone to prison in recent months. The authoritarian regime that has been consolidated since it dissolved Parliament three years ago has rushed until the last moment to tie a presidential election to the letter. A week ago, the new legislative chamber under Said’s control hastily reformed the electoral law to remove the Administrative Court, which had acted independently by recognizing the validity of three banned candidates, from supervising the voting process.
Last Tuesday, the Tunisian justice system sentenced the liberal Ayachi Zammel to 12 years in prison for irregularities in the presentation of endorsements, who had just been ratified by the electoral board as one of the two candidates who were going to be able to stand up to Said in the elections. urns. On Thursday, another court sentenced him to 18 more months of confinement in prison, which has already been his third sentence during the campaign in several proceedings opened against him. The other candidate, the pan-Arabist leader Zuhair Magzahui, remains silent in the meantime to avoid following in his same footsteps.
More than 170 people are detained in Tunisia for their political activity, of which 110 are related to the dissolved Islamist party Ennahda, the majority force in the Parliament dissolved by Said three years ago, according to a report by Human Rights Watch. “The authorities have arrested or excluded opposition candidates from elections, and have taken arbitrary measures against civil society organizations and independent media,” warns the New York-based NGO. Local and international observers and foreign correspondents, such as Morning Express’s correspondent for the Maghreb, have been excluded from the electoral process or have not received authorization to cover information on the voting.
“Dictators now prefer to run for elections,” he ironically Hafez al Ghwelldirector for North Africa at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, in a video call. “Both in Algeria, a month ago, and in Tunisia, this Sunday, Western countries prefer to look the other way in the presidential elections, given the interests of gas and oil, in the first, and the control of irregular immigration “Tunisia is on track to be in a worse situation with Said than with [Zin el Abidín] Ben Ali [el dictador depuesto en el primer estallido de la primavera árabe en 2011]”, points out the head of the Foreign Policy Institute of his university, who does not rule out that, once re-elected, the Tunisian president will amend the Constitution to be able to remain in power beyond the limit of two terms.
The erosion of civil liberties has extended to parties and organizations in Tunisian society. One of the imprisoned opposition leaders, the social democrat Jayam Turki, remains behind bars since February last year, despite the fact that legislation prohibits provisional detention from extending more than 14 months. Turki, 59, is the son of a Spanish republican exile in Tunisia and has a Spanish passport. Anti-terrorist legislation is applied to him, accused of conspiring against the State, for having organized meetings with European diplomats. The opposition, united around the National Salvation Front, which brings together Islamist, secular and left-wing forces, and which demands the resignation of Said after the “self-coup” that represented the closure of Parliament in 2021, has not been able to present a candidate alternative.
“After having concentrated executive power to the maximum in his hands during his first term, Said’s next target is Tunisian NGOs, which he has already accused of being financed by foreign funds,” says Professor Hafez al Ghwell. Among the detained leaders stands out Rachid Ganuchi, 82, former president of the Legislature and leader of the Islamist movement Ennahda. He was sentenced to three years in prison last February. Last August, six presidential candidates were sentenced to prison terms.
Five of the opposition candidates — Abdelatif Mekki, former leader of Ennahda; the activist Nizar Chaari, the magistrate Murad Messauidi, the professor Leila Hammami and the independent Mohamed Adel Dou—were sentenced to eight months in prison and disqualified for life as candidates, accused of having falsified support signatures. According to electoral regulations, one of the requirements to run is to provide a minimum of 10,000 endorsement signatures from 10 electoral districts. A sixth candidate, Abir Mussi, a former leader of dictator Ben Ali’s party, was sentenced to two years in prison for having criticized the lack of independence of the electoral board.
“Path of a dictatorship”
“The participation rate will not be high, as has been seen in recent elections, with only 11% turnout at the polls. In these presidential elections it will be difficult to exceed 30%,” predicts Haythem el Makki, 41, a political commentator for Radio Mosaïque, the main radio station in the Maghreb country, in a voice message. “Said is going to win, because he has done everything he can to make it that way,” says this analyst. “But we are heading towards a dictatorship, and towards the total economic collapse of the country,” he laments. The social crisis and the impoverishment of citizens is the main weak point of Said’s first term, which has had to confront the powerful General Union of Tunisian Workers, a union that has one million members, in a country of 11 million. of inhabitants.
Almost 13 years after a young man set himself on fire in Tunisia in a desperate gesture against the arbitrariness of the authorities, citizens are called to the polls to elect a president. A street vendor’s loud protest then ignited the flames of a arab springthat burned the dictator of Tunisia, the only country in the region of North Africa and the Middle East where a democratic system came to germinate after the revolts, before spreading to Libya, Egypt or Syria. Said’s foreseeable re-election is now seen as one of the last nails in the coffin of the emancipation movement that gave hope of freedom to millions of people.