TUNISIA’s President Kais Saied, seen as a saviour by supporters and an autocrat by critics, is running for re-election on Sunday in a vote that he is all but certain to win.
More than a dozen politicians had hoped to challenge him, but the electoral commission approved only two additional names for the ballot paper.
And one of those, Ayachi Zammel, was sentenced to 12 years in prison for falsifying documents just five days before the poll.
Tunisia was where the Arab Spring, a series of uprisings against autocratic rulers in North Africa and the Middle East, began in late 2010. The country was seen as a beacon of democracy for the Arab world.
But since President Saied was elected on a wave of optimism in 2019, the 66-year-old has suspended parliament, rewritten the constitution and concentrated power into his hands.
This is Tunisia’s third presidential election since Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali was overthrown in 2011. He had been in power for over two decades before he was forced to flee to Saudi Arabia following months of massive protests.
Sarah Yerkes, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace with an expertise in the Middle East, told the BBC, that the president had “manipulated the political and legal situation to such an extent that there is no contest – he is the only viable candidate”.
There have been no campaign rallies or public debates, and nearly all the campaign posters in the streets have been of the president.
Tunisia’s election was “really a referendum on Kais Saied”, Ms Yerkes added.
The North African country’s largest opposition party, Ennahda, said its senior members had been arrested at a level it had not seen before.
New York-based group Human Rights Watch reported that the authorities had excluded eight other prospective candidates from the election through prosecution and imprisonment.
In recent weeks, people have taken to the streets of the capital, Tunis, to protest against President Saied and demand free-and-fair elections.
