Saied’s low turnout win in Tunisia election sparks repression concerns

Tunisians are reckoning with what preliminary results suggest will be a landslide victory for incumbent Kais Saied in the presidential election despite a markedly low turnout.

In a contest marked by judicial controversy, widespread accusations of rigging and one of the three-man field languishing in prison, few believed that Saied would struggle to emerge victorious.

The preliminary results published by the electoral commission on Monday give Saied 90.7 percent of the vote, but turnout was a mere 28.8 percent, highlighting how divided the North African country is.

Earlier the same evening, the man accused by many of rolling back many of the gains the country has made since its 2011 revolution gave some indication of what his renewed mandate might mean, breaking off from what had presumably been a victory celebration to tell the national television channel: “This is a continuation of the revolution. We will build and will cleanse the country of the corrupt, traitors and conspirators.”

The corrupt, the traitors and the conspirators

After a protracted lull after the scattered demonstrations against Saied’s power grab of July 2021, which saw him shutter the parliament and dismiss the prime minister, the weeks building up to Sunday’s vote saw public protests return to the streets of the capital.

Demonstrators accused Saied of repression, including the crushing of much of civil society, the silencing of free speech and the lawfare waged upon the president’s political opponents and critics.

“It’s no surprise President Saied looks poised to win a second term after authorities did everything in their power to clear the field for him, from excluding and arresting prospective challengers, ignoring legal rulings to reinstate candidates,” Bassam Khawaja, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, told Al Jazeera. He also listed a decision to remove part of the election’s judicial oversight just days before the vote, the barring of election observers, and the crackdown on critics and independent media in Tunisia.

“His comments about cleansing the country are particularly ominous in light of the recent crackdown and mass arrests and his prior scapegoating of migrants,” Khawaja continued. “It’s clear that democracy in Tunisia is in a complete backslide.”

Accusations of a rigged vote

Rights organisations and activists sharply criticised the build-up to a vote that saw the bulk of the field precluded from running by an electoral authority loyal to Saied.

Of the 17 candidates who applied to compete in Sunday’s contest, only three were permitted by the Independent High Authority for Elections (ISIE) to run. Subsequent appeals by three of the rejected candidates, former ministers Imed Daimi and Mondher Znaidi and opposition leader Abdellatif Mekki, were upheld by the country’s highest judicial body, the Administrative Court, before the latter was stripped of its powers to oversee elections just days before the vote.

Of the three permitted to run, one, Ayachi Zammel, was arrested early in September and subsequently found guilty in four cases involving the falsifying of his electoral papers. Zammel, though still entitled to run, did so while embarking upon a 12-year sentence.

Zammel’s conviction saw the politician join a large number of the country’s politicians and party leaders in prison who might normally be expected to contest the election. Among them are high-profile figures such as Abir Moussi, a leader of the Free Destourian Party who supported Tunisia’s pre-revolution leader, and the 83-year-old Rached Ghannouchi, the former speaker of parliament and the leader of the Ennahdha Party, many of whose members were also arrested before the vote.

Low turnout

“I think turnout might have been even lower, but the opposition were very divided,” the Tunisian analyst Hamza Meddeb of the Carnegie Middle East Center said from France. “People had a choice whether to back the opposition candidates or to boycott the process entirely.”

“Saied didn’t have to deal with that. He was able to mobilise his entire base. He’s supported by the security services, much of the state, as well as the hundreds of thousands of people who rely upon it for financial survival,” Meddeb said.

“Also, let’s not forget, there are many people who just support the president and what he says is his war on corruption. They believe his populist message. They don’t see that jobs aren’t being created and the economy’s worsening,” Meddeb said of an economy that remains unreformed and continues to struggle despite Saied’s past election promises to address its weaknesses.

International implications

While European Union leaders have yet to comment on the apparent victory of Saied – whose government they have supported through aid and grants intended to bolster Tunisia’s capacity to limit migration to Europe – few are expected to condemn either the staging of the election or the wave of arbitrary arrests that preceded it.

Buoyed by EU funding, Tunisian authorities claim to have intercepted 21,000 people bound for Europe during the first quarter of this year alone. Many of those captured by Tunisian authorities who entered the territory from elsewhere in Africa are routinely subjected to rights abuses, including expulsions into the desert.

Nevertheless, with irregular migration a hot button political issue within the EU and Tunisia housing tens of thousands of irregular sub-Saharan African migrants and refugees, nearly all enduring desperate conditions while they await passage to Europe, expectations of EU criticism of Saied’s victory were scarce.

“EU officials and diplomats will all recognise the election,” Meddeb said, “If they were going to object to anything, they’d have done so in the build-up to the vote [when many of Saied’s opponents were arrested]. They don’t see themselves as having any alternative if they’re going to fight migration. Many I’ve spoken to see themselves as having already given Tunisia every chance to build a working democracy. Now it’s up to Tunisia. They just want to stop migration.”

No future

For many observers, the margin in the preliminary results only reinforced their worst fears: that Saied would interpret the election result as the public endorsement of the waves of oppression he has previously unleashed upon his opponents and critics.

“Saied essentially campaigned on conspiracy theories,” Tunisian essayist Hatem Nafti said from France. “That’s all he had. No programme, nothing.”

“He promised to fight for a new and independent Tunisia. As far as I was aware, Tunisia’s been independent since 1956, but that’s all he had and, looking at the results, it seems all he needed to have.”

Having campaigned upon conspiracy theories, Nafti saw little hope that an emboldened Saied wouldn’t now govern by the same means.

“He’ll continue. The shortages in food and water will be caused by traitors, other countries, I don’t know, the West,” he said, listing the frequent targets of Saied’s ire. “All I can see is more repression. Saied promised an improved Tunisia. All I see coming are new prisons.”