In Tunisia’s first presidential election since its authoritarian leader began dismantling the democracy Tunisians built after their 2011 Arab Spring revolution, the apparent winner came as little surprise: the incumbent himself.
President Kais Saied, first elected in 2019, easily won re-election on Sunday, according to exit polls broadcast on state television.
The government had disqualified most of his would-be challengers and arrested his main rival on electoral fraud charges that rights groups said were trumped up. The resulting race recalled the days of Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the dictator who ruled Tunisia from 1987 until his overthrow in 2011, rather than the competitive elections of the years in between, when Tunisia was working to develop a full-fledged democracy.
Mr. Saied captured more than 89 percent of the vote over Ayachi Zammel, the imprisoned candidate, and Zouhair Maghzaoui, a leftist who had previously supported Mr. Saied before running to replace him, according to exit polls.
But turnout was roughly half what it was in the last presidential election, according to figures released by the government commission that oversees elections — the latest sign that the country’s multiplying crises have damaged Tunisians’ faith in a president many once idolized, even though they see no real alternative to him among the country’s weak and fractious political opposition.
Government critics and human rights groups said the Saied-controlled electoral commission had all but guaranteed the president would prevail by barring other candidates from running, then ignoring a court ruling that had ordered three to be reinstated.
The commission was considered independent during the initial postrevolutionary period, when Tunisia’s fair elections, free press, independent judiciary, strong civil society and democratic constitution made it appear the sole success story to emerge from the Arab Spring.
Yet those gains never delivered the jobs, equality and accountability Tunisians had demanded during the revolution, which, for many, gave democracy itself a bad name.
Disillusioned, people across the country celebrated when Mr. Saied swept aside checks on his power in July 2021 and began establishing one-man rule. The hope was that the seemingly incorruptible president, who taught constitutional law before first being elected president, would at last tackle government corruption and dysfunction and rescue the country’s failing economy.
Since then, however, the economy has continued to founder and poverty to deepen while Mr. Saied continues to unpick most of Tunisia’s democratic successes.
He rewrote the constitution to allow him to select the electoral commission’s members, among other changes that concentrated power in his hands. His government has muzzled the media, subordinated the judiciary, and harassed watchdogs and rights groups with investigations and restrictions on funding.
The authorities have also jailed many of Mr. Saied’s most prominent critics, including several leaders of opposition political parties, along with journalists, lawyers, activists and ordinary people who have criticized the authorities on social media. Many were charged under a 2022 law criminalizing fake news.
The administrative court ruling that ordered the reinstatement of disqualified candidates was a rare show of independence. But the country’s meek Parliament, which no longer serves as a counterweight to the president, later stripped the court of power over electoral matters.
Vowing to restore the ideals of the revolution, Mr. Saied says he is acting to save Tunisia from unnamed traitors and conspirators.
“We’re going to cleanse the country of all the corrupt and schemers,” Mr. Saied said at his campaign headquarters on Monday evening, according to state television broadcasts.
Yet the low turnout indicated that Mr. Saied is no longer trusted as a savior.
If the exit polls are right, Mr. Saied’s huge margin of victory was even more lopsided than when he first won office with about 73 percent of the vote.
About half the electorate voted in the first round of the 2019 race. But just 27.7 percent of eligible voters participated on Sunday, according to preliminary turnout figures.
Much of the opposition boycotted the election, calling it a sham.
Other candidates, including the ones disqualified from the ballot, can still appeal the result before a final victor is announced on Wednesday, and a staff member for at least one disqualified candidate said before the election that they intended to do so.
But with Mr. Saied in control of the electoral process, appeals seem unlikely to succeed.
Mahdi Abdeljawad, an adviser to Mr. Zammel’s campaign, said that imprisonment was the biggest obstacle his bid faced, but not the only one. The electoral commission also restricted candidate spending to the point that Mr. Abdeljawad could not drive his own car to campaign headquarters because government officials would mark down use of the vehicle as a significant campaign expenditure, he said.
Tunisians had grown so fearful of opposing the president that the campaign had not been able to convince people to canvass openly for Mr. Zammel, even if they said they would vote for him, Mr. Abdeljawad said.
“Kais Saied doesn’t believe in elections,” he said. “He only organized them on this date because he had to. He hollowed the elections out.”
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