how the outgoing president, Kaïs Saïed, locked the vote

The election has not started yet the result seems already known to everyone in Tunisia. While the country’s approximately 9.7 million voters are called to the polls for the presidential election on Sunday, October 6, the conditions of the vote are being criticized. In power since 2019, the outgoing president, Kaïs Saïed, appears to have prepared everything to ensure his re-election.

Faced with him, only two candidates were authorized to present themselves, despite protests from the opposition. But their chances of winning are low, especially since one of them is worried by the courts. As for the ballot itself, its integrity has been threatened since it was placed under the control of a controversial commission and judges, themselves scrutinized by those in power. The all-powerful head of state has made several authoritarian turns of the screw, since his coup in July 2021 during which he granted himself full powers.

During the last presidential election in Tunisia, in October 2019, 26 candidates were validated by the Independent High Authority for Elections (Isie). Five years later, only three candidates, including President Kaïs Saïed, received the green light from the Tunisian electoral authority. In the meantime, this post-revolution commission, created at the end of the Ben Ali dictatorship in 2011, came under the control of the President of the Republic. Since a constitutional reform of April 2022, it is the only one able to appoint its seven members. What “falsify the election”, denounces the NGO Human Rights Watch.

“After imprisoning dozens of prominent opponents and activists, Tunisian authorities have removed almost all serious competitors from the presidential race, reducing this election to a mere formality.”

Bassam Khawaja, deputy Middle East and North Africa director of Human Rights Watch

in a press release

Despite an appeal by several rejected candidates, validated by the administrative justice in Tunis, Isie only approved two candidacies alongside that of the outgoing president. The Tunisian opposition is crying scandal, because the electoral casting calls for questions. One of these two candidates, THE Liberal Ayachi Zammel, 47, was sentenced in recent weeks to nearly fourteen years in prison in several cases in which he is accused of “false sponsorships”. This agri-food industrialist and former MP, until then little known to the general public, was arrested on September 2, the day his candidacy was validated by Isie. If Ayachi Zammel “stay in the running”as his lawyer assures him, his campaign has taken a hit, especially since he is not allowed to vote. On social networks, his team only has the right to share videos recorded before his arrest, while he is still the target of around thirty legal proceedings concerning his sponsorships.

The other successful candidate, Zouhair Maghzaoui, 59, from the nationalist People’s Movement party, is a former supporter of President Saïed. Even if he is critical of the head of state today, his profile is not that of a real rival, judges Khadija Mohsen-Finan, political scientist specializing in the Maghreb. “He is an opposition candidate who is not supposed to overshadow him, she explains to franceinfo. This gives the illusion of pluralism, as under Ben Ali, because Zouhair Maghzaoui is not important enough to beat Kaïs Saïed.” Or even “so that there is a second round”, she anticipates.

“All dissonant voices have been dismissed, imprisoned or discredited, believes Khadija Mohsen-Finan, adding: “On the other hand, there is no serious candidate to oppose Kaïs Saïed.” Faced with the protests, and especially after the burst of demonstrators in front of the Isie offices at the beginning of September, the president of the commission, Farouk Bouasker, was inflexible. “There is no recourse possible”he decided, cited by The Worldarguing that the Tunisian Constitution gave him all the powers in matters of organizing the vote.

President Saïed’s control over the vote has been further strengthened with the very recent revision of the Tunisian electoral law. Nine days before the presidential election, the country’s Parliament adopted by a large majority a reform transferring the arbitration of electoral disputes to the court of appeal, i.e. criminal justice, while this was until now the responsibility of the administrative justice.

“The problem with this last minute change is that the judiciary has become much less independent in recent years”notes Hatem Nafti, essayist and author of Our friend Kaïs Saïed (Riveneuve, 2024). “The judges were brought into line with the dissolution [en février 2022] of the Tunisian Judicial Council, which places the careers of judges under the control of the executive”he explains to franceinfo.

“If the magistrate does not judge in the direction of power, he risks losing his job.”

Hatem Nafti, Tunisian essayist and author of “My friend Kaïs Saïed”

at franceinfo

Latest example, “the forced transfer of the president of the Manouba court [dans la banlieue de Tunis]who had requested the release from pre-trial detention of the candidate [Ayachi Zammel] lack of sufficient evidence”argues Hatem Nafti. According to the Tunisian press, judge Essia Laabidi was transferred nearly 200 kilometers west of Tunis, to the Kef Court of Appeal, without knowing precisely where this order came from. In this context conducive to pressure, without independent national or foreign observers, NGOs and opposition parties fear that in the event of suspicion of electoral irregularity, the justice system will look the other way.

The recent electoral reform, voted “in the last meters” of the presidential campaign, according to several opposition voices, is all the more exasperating since it was voted on by an elected Parliament with an abstention close to 90%, at the end of January 2023. “After the electoral massacre, the government engages in a legal massacre”castigated the secretary general of the centrist Al Joumhouri party, Abdel Latif Al-Harmasi, quoted by the media Bawabat, after the adoption of this very controversial law.

“One by one, President Kaïs Saïed disconnected all the counter-powers in the country, analyzes Hatem Nafti. Addressing administrative justice was the last step in his political project.” Democratically elected in October 2019, on a promise of reform arousing popular hope, this 66-year-old conservative jurist shook up Tunisian political life in the space of one mandate. With a notable acceleration in 2021, after more than a year of the Covid-19 health crisis: it then dismissed his Prime Minister, suspended the Assembly then installed a new government and subsequently adopted a measure allowing it to govern by decree.

“When we see him change the electoral law in such an uninhibited way, in the middle of the campaign, it’s unprecedented, underlines Hatem Nafti. But we must understand that this is part of a broader authoritarian drift, which affects political parties as much as ordinary citizens, including the media.” The head of state also toughened his speech against sub-Saharan migrants, in a context of xenophobic outbreak in Tunisia. But beware of anyone who publishes a critical word about his iron fist. In September, issue 3140 of the magazine Young Africa titled on “The Hyper-President” Kaïs Saïed has been banned from sale in Tunisia. The director of the monthly deplored a “sad return to the Ben Ali years”.

Despite this offensive policy, everything is not over for Kaïs Saïed on Sunday. Far from debates, without really campaigning “apart from a few portraits brandished in the streets by his supporters”as Khadija Mohsen-Finan explains, the Tunisian president would still like “may this election be a plebiscite of his person and his project”. “This is why participation will be a very important data. He would like to win in a single round with figures close to those of 2019 [lorsqu’il avait été élu avec 72% des suffrages]. But he might not make it.”

According to the political scientist, most Tunisian voters are “divided between boycotting the election or going to vote to weaken the score [de Kaïs Saïed]“. The other question, she continues, “it’s knowing what will happen after his almost certain re-election”. With, as a backdrop, she warns, “increasing austerity”an economic slump and “opponents who risk being even more muzzled”.