Kais Saied is claiming a landslide election win. The truth is he was never willing to face a real competition. Just how insecure he feels will likely determine how much more repressive he will become.
By Nate Grubman
October 2024
In Tunisia’s October 6 presidential election, President Kais Saied won a second five-year term with 90.7 percent of the vote, according to official preliminary results. In the run-up to the contest, Saied’s regime ruthlessly foreclosed any possibility of defeat, revealing a president for whom the law had become more an instrument of power than constraint. But those same efforts also betrayed a lack of confidence in the president’s ability to marshal popular support. This power and vulnerability will now be tested as Saied’s regime confronts the country’s many postelection challenges.
Despite Saied’s accumulation of power since his seizure of control on 25 July 2021, many of his opponents harbored hopes that the end of his first term would offer an opportunity to hold the president accountable. There were always reasons to doubt that the elections would be fair. In 2022, Saied not only removed dozens of judges and public prosecutors but also replaced much of the previously independent election commission. A newly compliant judicial branch facilitated the prosecution of speech and other political crimes not only of high-profile opposition politicians but also of journalists and ordinary citizens, creating a climate of fear. Saied’s appointed electoral commission oversaw the enactment of a new, hyperpresidential constitution and the election of a bicameral legislature deferential to the president.
In the president’s telling, the election was a milestone in what he describes as a war of attrition for national liberation against unnamed domestic and foreign forces determined to divide Tunisians and weaken the state for their own profit. This line of argument has served as a justification for the transformation of state institutions that Saied has led since his July 2021 autogolpe, as well as the heavy hand with which his regime has treated dissent. Saied’s prosecution of his war intensified this summer as the elections approached. In May, after he delivered an incendiary speech accusing migrant-rights activists of treason and aiming to permanently settle black migrants in Tunisia, the police arrested prominent antiracism activists, such as Saadia Mosbah and Sherifa Riahi, purportedly for money laundering — a crime for which the antiterrorism law allows the suspension of due process. Although much of Tunisia’s civil society continues to operate, the arrest of some activists, broad allegations of corruption by Saied and his supporters, new requirements imposed by banks, and the looming possibility of a restrictive NGO law have constrained civil society activists’ ability to do their work.
The tightening of civil society space has been accompanied by pressure on the public sphere, which also intensified as the election approached. Shortly after the arrest of Mosbah and Riahi, lawyer and radio journalist Sonia Dahmani sarcastically questioned the president’s assertion that Tunisia is so magnificent that migrants would be eager to settle there. She was charged with spreading misinformation and arrested by police officers who stormed the bar association. Dahmani was later sentenced to a year in prison. When on the third anniversary of Saied’s assumption of extraordinary power he announced an amnesty for hundreds of bloggers who had been imprisoned under the draconian misinformation law, Dahmani and other prominent journalists were not among those released. Although many journalists have continued to produce critical work, many have either resorted to self-censorship or left the profession altogether.
Nonetheless, there were reasons to hope that the end of Saied’s first term might offer a course correction. Whereas Saied was encouraging Tunisians to consider themselves in a state of war, many of his opponents employed standard kitchen-table opposition politics, inviting Tunisians to ask whether they are better off today than when the president seized power. The macroeconomic figures suggest that many are not. Tunisia has experienced approximately zero per capita GDP growth over the last two years. Inflation has hovered near 7 percent this year, with food and healthcare costs rising even faster. Shortages of basic goods such as medicine, sugar, and milk as well as electricity and water cutoffs have become common. In August, Saied abruptly fired the prime minister and reshuffled the government, alleging that its claims that the water supply was low were part of a conspiracy to weaken him.
In the immediate wake of his 2021 takeover, public-opinion polls suggested that Saied enjoyed widespread popularity. By the summer of 2024, however, he was clearly subject to a classic “dictator’s dilemma,” in which fear prevented honest assessments of the president’s support. Public-opinion polls are not conducted as frequently as in the past, and direct questions regarding Saied’s support are likely of little use in any case. Indeed, research has shown that many Tunisians overstate their support for Saied, perhaps out of fear of expressing dissent. Michaël Béchir Ayari of the International Crisis Group reports that in the lead-up to the election, opponents of Saied circulated public-opinion research showing that the president’s true support had diminished. Moreover, the president, who has no party, has generally not shown an ability to mobilize Tunisians on his behalf. Saied’s previous efforts to mobilize voters — a national consultation process and referendum on a new constitution in 2022, legislative elections in 2022–23, and occasional calls for demonstrations — have enjoyed meager participation.
Although the opposition continues to have its disagreements, the fact that previous boycotts failed to significantly weaken Saied strengthened the case of those who sought to participate this time. And the country’s two-round election system, it was thought, alleviated the need for the opposition to coordinate around a single candidate ahead of the first round. If the opposition could get a few candidates on the ballot, perhaps they could at least send the election into a second round. The runoff would then become a referendum on a system that has done little to improve Tunisians’ lives since the president assumed greater power.
Running Against the Wind
One of Saied’s strategies has been to offer Tunisians a choice between the chaotic period that preceded his dissolution of the parliament and what he and his supporters have called the July 25th path. There will be no return to what was before, Saied is fond of saying. The implied choice is between either Saied or Ennahdha, the Islamist party that many Tunisians came to blame for the challenges that accompanied the democratic transition. Many leaders of Ennahdha, as well as the parties that sometimes worked with it, have been imprisoned since early 2023 with no trial. As if to remind Tunisians that the Islamists still exist, the police arrested nearly a hundred of them shortly into the campaign period. But as more time has elapsed since July 2021, the opposition to Saied has become multifaceted, including groups that initially cheered his seizing power.
In a country in which the regime has been quick to imprison opposition leaders, it is surprising how many Tunisians threw their hat into the ring this year. This spring, several candidates belonging to mainstream political parties during the transition announced that they planned to run against Saied. Abdellatif Mekki had been somewhat of a rival to Ennahdha cofounder Rached Ghannouchi within the party during the democratic transition. Mekki served as health minister at the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, a period in which Tunisia seemed to perform better than much of the world. After Saied’s autogolpe, Mekki resigned from Ennahdha and urged it to temporarily retreat. Other former Ennahdha-friendly MPs also announced their candidacies, including Essam Chebbi, Ghazi Chaouachi, and Imed Daimi.
Politicians with ties to former Tunisian dictator Zine Abidine Ben Ali’s networks and to the country’s business class also decided to run. Most prominent among them was the Free Destourian Party’s secretary general, Abir Moussi, whose candidacy would have been anathema to the Islamists. But in October 2023, after her party announced that she planned to run for president, Moussi was imprisoned for criticizing the president and election commission. With Moussi in jail, other candidates palatable to the business networks that supported Ben Ali surfaced, including Mondher Zenaidi, a former government minister who had largely retreated into obscurity during the democratic transition, and the relatively unknown former MP and businessman Ayachi Zammel.
Other candidates belong to neither of these camps, including former leader of the Arab nationalist People’s Movement and Saied supporter-turned-critic, Zouheir Maghzaoui; Lotfi Mraihi and Safi Said, each of whom had won more than 200,000 votes in the 2019 presidential election; and tatted-up rapper and Ben Ali’s son-in-law, K2Rhym, who finished third in a 2023 poll; along with many others.
It quickly became clear that the election commission had no plans to print a long ballot. In 2019, the commission released the electoral calendar six months before the vote. This time around, it waited for the president to pick a date. Saied, who relishes the moments when his opponents try to parse his ambiguity, waited until July 2 to announce that the elections would take place on October 6. Because the recently elected legislature had not revised the electoral law to comply with the conditions of the 2022 constitution, including that the president be at least forty years old and have fully Tunisian parents and grandparents, the election commission took the liberty to revise the law through executive order. Some legal scholars criticized the commission for assuming the power of a legislature, while opposition groups objected to newly imposed conditions that would make it difficult for candidates to join the race, including the requirement to present a copy of their criminal record (which Tunisians call B3). Candidates unable to get ten signatures from members of parliament or 40 from the heads of local assemblies would have to get 10,000 endorsements from registered voters, with at least 500 each in ten different electoral districts. Any candidate found to have bribed voters or accepted foreign funding would also be barred.
It was already clear that getting on the ballot would not be a matter of demonstrating widespread popular support. Five days after announcing his candidacy, Mekki was hauled into court to answer questions about the death of Jilani Daboussi, a Ben Ali–era official who died in 2014 after alleged mistreatment during a 30-month imprisonment coinciding with Mekki’s tenure as minister of health (there is no evidence he was involved in Daboussi’s treatment.) Mekki was ordered not to travel or appear in the media. When Mraihi announced his intention to run, he was charged with money laundering and soon after with vote buying (along with Safi Said) in the 2019 contest. In addition to an eight-month prison sentence, Mraihi was banned for life from running for office.
Once candidates began to collect signatures, new opportunities opened for the regime to arrest its opponents. Tunisians can check whether their signature has been used by a candidate for political office and file a complaint if they believe that their signature has been used fraudulently. Several candidates were prosecuted on these charges, given prison sentences, and banned from running, including K2Rhym, Mekki, the journalist Nizar Chaari, former military officer Adel Daou, former magistrate Mourad Messaoudi, and academic Leila Hammami. Saied’s campaign, for its part, claimed to have collected almost a quarter-million endorsements. But despite citizen complaints that the president’s campaign had fraudulently used their data, the courts took no action.
Ultimately, the election commission approved just three candidates, a dramatic drop from the 26 who appeared on the ballot in 2019, allowing Saied to advance to the second round with less than 20 percent of the vote. Only Maghzaoui and Zammel joined Saied on the ballot. Although many in the opposition mistrusted Maghzaoui for his previous support of Saied, some started to consider Zammel. But Zammel was arrested for forging signatures prior to the campaign kickoff and then given a twelve-year prison sentence. Whereas in 2019 the election commission pushed for then-candidate Nabil Karoui to be released from prison so that he could campaign, this time the commission stayed quiet.
The opposition received a surprising boost in early September, however, when the administrative court, charged with hearing candidates’ appeals, issued a decision ordering the commission to reinstate three potentially formidable candidates, each of whom had been unfairly denied their B3: Daimi, Mekki, and Zenaidi. Suddenly, it appeared that voters might have some choice on October 6. The court’s decision briefly punctured the notion that Saied was in full command of all arms of the state.
But in the end, the election commission simply ignored the court’s decision, claiming that the full text of the decision had come after the court’s internal deadline. This triggered speculation that the court might nullify the election, no matter the results. To prevent this from happening, a group of Saied’s supporters in the legislature summoned their colleagues from recess to revise the electoral law. They stripped the court of its authority to hear appeals, alleging that it had become an existential threat to the state (echoing Saied’s rationale for the 2021 autogolpe). During the legislative session, one MP was gaveled down when he played a recording of Saied describing a previous attempt to revise the electoral law shortly before an election as an “assassination of democracy.” The law passed by a vote of 116 to 12, altering the rules of the game ten days before the election.
On September 4, shortly before the campaign period began, Saied issued a presidential decree imposing a campaign spending limit of approximately US$50,000 and eliminating public campaign financing. Of course, this policy was less constraining to Saied, already known by all and benefiting daily from the visibility of the presidency. Maghzaoui challenged Saied to a debate, but the president ignored the invitation. Citizen election-observation groups that had accrued experience monitoring polls during Tunisia’s democratic transition applied to observe the 2024 elections. But the election commission rejected most of their applications on grounds of suspicious foreign funding. In 2019, there were approximately 18,000 independent election observers. This year, there were approximately 1,700.
The Coming Term
In the end, the election commission reported that 2.8 million Tunisians (28.8 percent) turned out to vote, far greater than the turnout for the 2022–23 legislative elections but fewer than the 3.4 million that turned out in the first round of the 2019 presidential election. Officially, more than 2.4 million Tunisians voted for Saied, giving him 90.7 percent of the vote. This result will allow Saied to argue that he still has Tunisians on his side. But it is impossible to know how the elections would have turned out had they given Tunisians greater choice.
Critics of the democratic transition have long accused the country’s political leadership of sidestepping economic problems and wasting precious time by taking three years to elect a constituent assembly and drafting a brand-new constitution in 2014. Three years have now passed since Saied’s assumption of extraordinary powers. In that time, the president has called upon Tunisians to participate in three national elections, a national consultation on the constitution, and a constitutional referendum. Yet the law organizing the division of labor between the two chambers of the legislature was only issued less than a month ago, and the constitutional court remains unformed. There are many who might say that the time and resources Saied’s regime expended on another noncompetitive election, not to mention the president’s focus on revamping the political system, would have been better spent responding to people’s social and economic demands.
Now is the season for the government and parliament to turn to the finance law, which is critical for laying out how the state will address economic challenges in the coming year. This is often a tense time of year in Tunisia. The elections accomplished little in building social consensus on contentious economic-policy issues. In Saied’s first term, he pledged to spur local development by creating a system by which the government could recover looted funds from corrupt businesspeople and invest them in cooperatives. But that system has recovered little. The president pledged to end precarious employment by banning companies from subcontracting. But his government has so far put the brakes on these efforts. Saied depicts himself as a champion of ordinary Tunisians seeking better public services and regularly releases videos of himself badgering public officials about their performance. Such displays may give some solace to frustrated Tunisians, but so far appear to have done little to deliver better services.
The president begins his new term having shown himself to be unwilling to risk open competition and ready to respond to dissent with a shamelessly heavy hand. He now faces a decision. If he feels secure in having won a second term, he could pursue some degree of reconciliation with his opposition by releasing political prisoners and revising harsh laws like the misinformation law. But Saied’s rhetoric has been so heated that this would require a significant pivot. He could also take his victory as a signal to continue relying on repression. But this strategy is risky, as the possibility always exists that an overstep will spark popular backlash or even a revolt from within.
Nate Grubman is a research consultant at the Deliberative Democracy Lab at Stanford University. He is a social science researcher focused on party systems, democratic deliberation, nostalgia, and corruption during transitions from authoritarian rule.
Copyright © 2024 National Endowment for Democracy
Image credit: Olivier Matthys/Getty Images
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