TUNIS: Tunisians voted Sunday in a presidential election largely expected to see incumbent Kais Saied secure another five years in office while his main critics — including one contender — are behind bars. Three years after Saied staged a sweeping power grab, the election is seen as a closing chapter in Tunisia’s short-lived experiment with democracy. After ousting longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, Tunisia prided itself for more than a decade on being the birthplace of the Arab Spring uprisings against dictatorship.

The ISIE electoral board has said about 9.7 million people were expected to turn out. About 47 percent of them are aged between 36 and 60. At one polling station in central Tunis, a group of mostly older men were seen queueing up to vote. “I came to support Kais Saied,” 69-year-old Nouri Masmoudi said. “My whole family is going to vote for him.” Fadhila, 66, said she voted “in response to those who called for a boycott”. The station had seen “a good influx of voters”, mostly over 40 years of age, its director Noureddine Jouini said, with 200 voters in the first half hour of polling. An hour into the vote, Farouk Bouasker, head of ISIE, said the board had seen a “considerable attendance” of voters.

‘Respectable number’

In another station in the capital, Hosni Abidi, 40, said he feared electoral fraud. “I don’t want people to choose for me,” he said. “I want to check the box for my candidate myself.” In Bab Jedid, a working-class neighborhood, there were fewer voters, and most were elderly men. Saied cast his vote alongside his wife in the affluent Ennasr neighborhood, north of Tunis, in the morning. That station then saw a “very respectable number” of voters, its head Aycha Zidi said.

After rising to power in a landslide in 2019, Saied led a sweeping power grab that saw him rewrite the constitution. A burgeoning crackdown on dissent ensued, and a number of Saied’s critics across the political spectrum were jailed, sparking criticism both at home and abroad. New York-based Human Rights Watch has said more than “170 people are detained in Tunisia on political grounds or for exercising their fundamental rights”. Jailed opposition figures include Rached Ghannouchi, head of the Islamist-inspired opposition party Ennahdha, which dominated political life after the revolution. Also detained is Abir Moussi, head of the Free Destourian Party, which critics accuse of wanting to bring back the regime that was ousted in 2011. 

‘Pharaoh manipulating the law’

“Many fear that a new mandate for Saied will only deepen the country’s socio-economic woes, as well as hasten the regime’s authoritarian drift,” the International Crisis Group recently said. Yet voters are being presented with almost no alternative to Saied, after ISIE barred 14 hopefuls from standing in the race, citing insufficient endorsements among other technicalities. Mohamed Aziz, a 21-year-old voter, said he was “motivated by the elections because choosing the right person for the next five years is important”.

Wajd Harrar, a 22-year-old student, said that in 2019, while she was too young to vote, “people had chosen a bad president”. This time, she added, “I have the right to vote and I will give my vote to the least bad candidate.” Hundreds of people protested in the capital on Friday, marching along a heavily policed Habib Bourguiba Avenue as some demonstrators bore signs denouncing Saied, 66, as a “Pharaoh manipulating the law”. Standing against him Sunday are former lawmaker Zouhair Maghzaoui, 59, who backed Saied’s power grab in 2021, and Ayachi Zammel, 47, a little-known businessman who has been in jail since his bid was approved by ISIE last month.

Zammel currently faces more than 14 years in prison on accusations of having forged endorsement signatures to enable him to stand in the election. In a speech on Thursday, Saied called for a “massive turnout to vote” and usher in what he called an era of “reconstruction”. He cited “a long war against conspiratorial forces linked to foreign circles”, accusing them of “infiltrating many public services and disrupting hundreds of projects” under his tenure.

The International Crisis Group said while Saied “enjoys significant support among the working classes, he has been criticized for failing to resolve the country’s deep economic crisis”. Voting is set to end at 6:00 pm (1700 GMT). The electoral board has said preliminary results should come no later than Wednesday but may be known earlier. — AFP