Tunisians voted on Sunday in a presidential election, where incumbent Kais Saied is largely expected to secure another five years in office, while many of his main critics—including one contender—are behind bars. Three years after Saied staged a sweeping power grab, the election is viewed as a closing chapter in Tunisia’s brief experiment with democracy.
After ousting longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, Tunisia prided itself on being the birthplace of the Arab Spring uprisings against dictatorship for more than a decade.
At a polling station in central Tunis, a group of mostly older men were seen lining up to vote. “I came to support Kais Saied,” said 69-year-old Nouri Masmoudi. “My whole family is going to vote for him.”
Fadhila, 66, added that she voted “in response to those who called for a boycott.”
The polling station’s director, Noureddine Jouini, reported a “good influx of voters,” mostly over 40 years of age, with 200 voters in the first half-hour of polling. An hour into the vote, Farouk Bouasker, head of the ISIE, noted that the board had observed a “considerable attendance” of voters.
In another polling station in the capital, Hosni Abidi, 40, expressed concerns about electoral fraud. “I don’t want people to choose for me,” he stated. “I want to check the box for my candidate myself.”
In Bab Jedid, a working-class neighborhood, there were fewer voters, and most of them were elderly men.
Meanwhile, Saied cast his vote alongside his wife in the affluent Ennasr neighborhood, north of Tunis, earlier in the morning. Aycha Zidi, the head of that station, reported a “very respectable number” of voters.
After rising to power in a landslide in 2019, Saied initiated a sweeping power grab that included rewriting the constitution. This led to a burgeoning crackdown on dissent, with many of Saied’s critics across the political spectrum being jailed, drawing criticism both domestically and internationally.
New York-based Human Rights Watch noted that more than “170 people are detained in Tunisia on political grounds or for exercising their fundamental rights.” Among the jailed opposition figures is 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 restore the regime that was ousted in 2011.
