President Kais Saied, alone at the helm of Tunisia for three years and given the winner of Sunday’s vote according to initial estimates, is convinced of being invested with a “divine mission” to save his country from external “plots”.
Democratically elected in 2019 under the slogan “The people want”, Mr. Saied, 66, was applauded by jubilant crowds when he granted himself full powers on July 25, 2021 to, he assured, respond to the blockages political and economic.
Three years later, Amnesty International points to “a worrying decline in fundamental rights in the cradle of the Arab Spring” and “an authoritarian turn”, unraveling the achievements of the Revolution which overthrew the dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011.
From February 2022, the former assistant professor in constitutional law dissolved the Superior Council of the Judiciary, “the last bastion of judicial impartiality”, according to Amnesty, and reorganizes the management of the electoral authority Isie as he wishes.
In the summer of 2022, he had a constitutional revision adopted by referendum, restoring an ultra-presidential system similar to the regimes of Habib Bourguiba (1957-1987) and Ben Ali (1987-2011), transforming Parliament into a registration chamber.
From February 2023, political figures and businessmen, who tried to form an opposition front, were arrested, followed in 2024 by trade unionists, community activists and known political commentators. The majority of them are still in prison.
“Hindered by hidden hands”
Clean-shaven, bald head and slender silhouette, Kais Saied promised to “rebuild a new Tunisia”, after a first mandate dedicated to fighting “against the forces of conspiracy under foreign influence” having “infiltrated numerous public services and disrupted hundreds of projects”.
A speech that works with its supporters.
Slah Assali, his 45-year-old former mechanic in Tunis, described to AFP “a serious person who works a lot, but is constantly hampered by hidden hands”.
Imed Mehimdi, 45, a coffee waiter who has known him for 20 years, believes that after having “put the country back on track” in the face of “mafia and corruption”, Mr. Saied will “start the train again”.
Over the past five years, Kais Saied, who made his name by deciphering the Constitution on television, has only given a few press conferences. His communication is limited to videos on the presidency’s Facebook page, where, in a strict suit and tie, he is the only one to speak.
The anthropologist Youssef Seddik, who met him regularly before the 2019 election, was “struck by his kindness and his sense of listening” which “contrast with his stiffness” today.
In three years, he changed prime ministers three times and sacked dozens of ministers.
For Romdhane Ben Amor, spokesperson for the NGO Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES), the president “does not believe in the role of intermediaries between the people and him”. He “considers that he has a revolutionary divine mission” to “realize the will of the people.”
But beyond promises of a new “war of national liberation and self-determination” for Tunisia, its project remains poorly defined.
“Diktats”
In his speeches, he does not hesitate to criticize international institutions, such as the IMF, whose “diktats” and a loan of two billion dollars he refused, or civil society, which he accuses of “receiving enormous sums from abroad.
To his promise to revive the economy with phosphate or “citizen companies”, a sort of self-managed cooperatives, economists oppose sluggish growth, high unemployment (16%) and heavy debt (80% of GDP).
Internationally, it is very close to neighboring Algeria, which supports Tunisia with credits and hydrocarbon shipments at friendly prices.
Defender of pan-Arabism, Kais Saied shows his support for the Palestinian cause. It has moved closer to China, Iran and Russia, even if the European Union remains its main trading partner and donor, and the United States its arms supplier.
Born in 1958 in Beni Khiar, near Nabeul (center-east) in a middle-class family, conservative in morals (notably homosexuality), he is married to the magistrate Ichraf Chebil and is the father of two daughters and a boy. He taught constitutional law until his retirement in 2018.
A lover of classical Arabic music and calligraphy, he writes his important messages in ink and pen.