Tunisians are being called to the polls on Monday July 25 to vote on the draft new Constitution put forward by President Kaïs Saïed, who came to power after a coup just a year ago. According to Vincent Geisser, researcher at the Institute for Research and Studies on the Arab and Muslim Worlds (IREMAM), this shift towards authoritarianism puts an end to the rather parliamentary parenthesis in place in the country since 2014.
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Vincent Geisser: “It is not a step back, it is rather a new authoritarianism with a big particularity: Ben Ali had a liberal and democratic constitution for a practice of authoritarian power; Kaïs Saïed has there an authoritarian practice with an authoritarian Constitution. The Constitution reflects his authoritarian power. It is not full powers, but we are witnessing a phenomenon of concentration of executive, legislative and parliamentary powers in the hands of a single man: it is the renunciation of the principle of separation of powers which is essential in any parliamentary democracy.
Is there a credible opposition today in Tunisia?
One of the strengths of this president is that he plays on the unpopularity of his opponents. Many people are very skeptical about this Constitution, but that does not benefit the opposition, which fails to mobilize massively against this president and against his project. The strength of the president is ultimately also the weakness of the Tunisian opposition.
He also played a lot on this theme of elite corruption: “Parties are corruption. Parliament is corruption. I am your recourse. I am your saviour.” But at the same time, he creates a very high expectation in the popular and lower layers of Tunisian society who expect a lot on the economic and social level and who risk being disappointed, not because this president may have an authoritarian program. , but because it does not necessarily have an economic and social program to reform Tunisia in depth.
Does he have the support of the security forces?
We can say that the security forces supported his coup d’etat, a year ago on July 25, not out of ideology, but because he appeared to be the man of order in the face of the disorder of parliamentarians. Today, they support it to a certain extent, we return to a Tunisian public space extremely locked by the security apparatus. But we don’t really have an X-ray: what is the position of the army? What is the police? Senior army officers?
For this, Kaïs Saïed plays the card of Islamist terrorism, but above all he plays a much stronger card: reintegration into the Arab world. The great strength of this president is his support in the Arab world: he is rather popular among the Arabs, not with the peoples, but with the regimes.
What about Westerners?
It is true that there are very important issues such as terrorism and immigration on which one might think that a president who would maintain a certain stability, even if he is not very attentive to human rights, will satisfy part of French foreign policy. But there is still, rather, a Western discontent. The European Union, Germany, the United States are very angry to see this authoritarian turn. It is the democratic window of the Arab world which falls today in Tunisia. But even if in the regime, the parenthesis of the Arab Spring is over, it is not in people’s minds.