Only 8.8 percent of those eligible to vote went to parliamentary elections on Saturday – in protest against President Saied. Now, outbreaks of violence are feared.
Tunis/Istanbul. Kais Saied carefully chose the date of the parliamentary elections in Tunisia. The autocratic president called citizens to the polls on Saturday, exactly twelve years after the uprising against longtime ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali began in 2010. Saied (64) wanted to use the memory of liberation from dictatorship to let Parliament be elected by his grace, but he put a strong point: not even nine percent of voters in the country with its approximately twelve million inhabitants voted. Now the opposition demands Saied’s resignation and new elections.
The independent constitutional lawyer was elected president in 2019. In the summer of 2021, he dissolved parliament, in which the Islamist Ennahda party was the strongest party, on the grounds that the country’s elite was preventing important reforms. Almost single-handedly, he crafted a new constitution that gives him almost unlimited powers as head of state and reduces the rights of parliament.