Tunisia heads for first elections since presidential power grab

Tunisia (Image: Reuters)

Depending on whom you ask in Tunisia, Saturday’s parliamentary elections — the first since a 2021 presidential power grab that all but killed the country’s young democracy — represent either major progress or a charade.

To some, the new electoral law governing the vote is an innovation that will shatter the power of the corrupt political parties that wrecked Tunisia’s economy, subverted justice and made a mockery of the country’s 10-year experiment with democracy. To others, it is the illegitimate brainchild of a president with autocratic aspirations of his own.

It may be seen as delivering a group of parliamentarians perceived as far more representative of their districts than previous Tunisian assemblies, or a rubber-stamp chamber that will impose few checks on President Kais Saied’s one-man rule. It might be the next step in Saied’s plan to clean up corruption and return Tunisia to prosperity and the original goals of the 2011 revolution. Or it is the next stop on the way to looming political and economic ruin.

This will be the fourth time that Tunisians have gone to the polls since overthrowing an autocrat in the 2011 revolt, which inspired the Arab Spring uprisings across the region and established the only democracy to emerge from the movement.

The elections will resuscitate a body that Saied suspended in July 2021 in what growing numbers of Tunisians now call a coup, demolishing the young democracy as he began governing by presidential decree. At the time, Tunisians from all classes and regions greeted the moment with cheers and relief, hoping and believing that Saied would fulfill the revolution’s unmet promises.

The president later vowed to restore the assembly as part of a series of sweeping political changes, including the drafting of a new constitution that he personally oversaw, that would put Tunisia back on track.

Caught between their misgivings about the president and loathing of the political parties that oppose him, many Tunisians appear lukewarm at best on this vote. The scant interest may partly reflect the fact that Tunisians’ minds are occupied by making ends meet, not politics.

But the new parliament will look little like the one it replaces thanks to Saied’s new constitution and electoral law, which, among other changes, prevents political parties from being involved in elections. And as the economy has cratered over the past year, more Tunisians are losing faith that Saied’s project will bring about the changes they are desperate to see.

“What is happening is just a charade,” said Haifa Homri, 24, a law student who went from volunteering for Saied’s presidential campaign in 2019 to joining an anti-Saied protest of several hundred people in central Tunis last Saturday. “We can’t call them elections,” she added.

“I see that the president has made promises,” she said. “But in reality, we can all see the economy is collapsing,” she added, pointing to Tunisia’s grim reality: prices too high, jobs too few, basics such as cooking oil and bottled water scarce on store shelves, and record numbers of people drowning off the coast in a desperate bid to migrate to Europe.

Saied’s new electoral law, which, like all laws since July 2021, was issued by decree, removes from the electoral process the much-despised political parties that constitute some of his only organized opposition.

It has voters selecting individual candidates in each district instead of a party list — a change Saied’s supporters say will buttress democratic accountability by ensuring new members of parliament know and are known by the people they represent.

All political parties are also banned from financing candidates, and there are no longer quotas for female or young candidates, which were instituted after the revolution.

Those regulations have raised concerns that, far from becoming more representative of the country, parliament will fill with men with the means to fund their own campaigns: businessmen, local notables and tribal elders. Of the 1,055 candidates running for 161 seats, just 122 are women.

Such rules have led most of the major parties to boycott the elections, as they did the referendum earlier this year in which Tunisians approved Saied’s new constitution. They say the vote is illegitimate.

Yet some analysts warn that sitting out the election risks ceding the entire field to Saied supporters, who include many of the candidates.

Without parties to set the agenda and unite members around common causes, the new parliament is expected to be fractured, chaotic and unproductive, offering few checks on the president’s power.

Even an assembly full of political opponents would be largely helpless, as Saied’s new constitution greatly increases presidential power, reducing parliament to an advisory role from the main force in government.

“So this is doomed to be a parliament that is marginalized,” said Youssef Cherif, a political analyst who is the director of the Columbia Global Centers in Tunis. “I think people will now understand more and more that the power is in the hands of the president.”

Turnout has declined in every election since the revolution as faith in democracy has dwindled. The Chahed Observatory, an elections monitor, said the level of interest in the vote is the lowest in a decade, even below July’s constitutional referendum, when turnout was less than one-third.

In previous elections, party organizations helped boost turnout and energy. But this time, the self-funded candidates have mounted anemic campaigns, and only one candidate is on the ballot in some districts.

And then there is the preoccupation with the flailing economy.

Though the government has struck a preliminary deal with the International Monetary Fund for a $1.9 billion loan, economists say it will cover only a small part of the country’s needs. The government is struggling to meet a heavy debt burden, pay public salaries and keep importing basic commodities.

The conditions the government agreed to have drawn the ire of Tunisia’s public-sector labor union, earning Saied a powerful new opponent over the very issue on which he is most vulnerable.

The union’s opposition has helped prevent previous Tunisian governments from pushing through the tough changes that the IMF demands, such as selling off publicly owned companies and lifting subsidies on food, gas and electricity.

With the economy in free fall, the drumbeat of politically motivated prosecutions and the weakening of civil liberties under Saied have drawn less attention. But the president remains steadfast against criticism.

“Tunisians know that all the work I’m doing is for Tunisians to live with dignity and liberty,” he said while visiting a poor neighborhood in Tunis on Sunday night, going on to criticize the opposition as doing little to improve living conditions when it was in power. “We will stick to the principles we started with, and we will carry on.”

(Author: Ahmed Ellali and Vivian Yee)/(c.2021 The New York Times Company)