Tunisia polls open with President Kais Saied set for re-election

Electoral body says about 9.7 million people are eligible to vote, but key presidential contenders are behind bars.

Voting in Tunisia’s presidential election has opened with no real opposition to incumbent Kais Saied, widely tipped to win as his most prominent critics, including a key contender, are behind bars.

Three years after a sweeping power grab by Saied, the election on Sunday is seen as a closing chapter in Tunisia’s experiment with democracy.

Polling stations opened at 8am (07:00 GMT) and will close at 6pm (17:00 GMT). Preliminary results should come no later than Wednesday but may be known earlier, according to ISIE, the electoral board.

ISIE said about 9.7 million voters are expected to turn out, but the near certainty of a victory by Saied, the ban and imprisonment of several opposition candidates as well as the country’s economic decline have left voters unwilling to head to the polls.

In the lead-up to the polling day on Sunday, there have been no campaign rallies or public debates, and nearly all of the campaign posters in city streets have been of Saied.

With little hope for change in a country mired in economic crisis, the mood among much of the electorate has been one of resignation.

“We have nothing to do with politics,” Mohamed, a 22-year-old who gave only his first name for fear of retribution, told the AFP news agency in Tunis.

Neither he nor his friends planned to vote, he said, because they believed it was “useless”.

The North African country had prided itself for more than a decade on being the birthplace of the Arab Spring uprisings against dictatorship.

Hopes of establishing democracy, however, soon faded after Saied took control of the government in 2021 and later dissolved the parliament, after being democratically elected in 2019.

Crackdown on dissent ensued, and a number of Saied’s critics across the political spectrum were jailed, prompting criticism both at home and abroad.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has said more than “170 people are detained in Tunisia on political grounds or for exercising their fundamental rights”.

Jailed opposition figures include Mohamed Ghannouchi, head of the Islamist-inspired opposition party Ennahdha, which dominated political life after the revolution.

Also imprisoned is Abir Moussi, head of the Free Constitutional Party, which critics accuse of wanting to bring back the regime ousted in 2011.

Several other presidential contenders are also behind bars, including Ayachi Zammel, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Tuesday.

The International Crisis Group think tank said on Friday that “the president’s nationalist discourse and economic hardship” have “corroded any enthusiasm ordinary citizens might have felt about the election”.

“Many fear that a new mandate for Saied will only deepen the country’s socioeconomic woes, as well as hasten the regime’s authoritarian drift,” it said.

On Friday, hundreds of people protested in the capital Tunis, marching along a heavily policed Habib Bourguiba Avenue as some demonstrators bore signs denouncing Saied as a “Pharaoh manipulating the law”.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies