TUNIS - Tunisia’s incumbent President Kais Saied is set to win the country’s presidential election with 89.2 percent support despite a low turnout, according to exit polls broadcast on national television Sunday after polls closed.
Saied, 66, is expected to win by a landslide, routing his challengers -- imprisoned rival Ayachi Zammel, who was set to collect 6.9 percent of the vote, and Zouhair Maghzaoui, with 3.9 percent, said independent polling group Sigma Conseil.
Three years after Saied staged a sweeping power grab, rights groups fear re-election will only further entrench his rule in the country, the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring uprisings. With the ouster of longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, Tunisia prided itself on being the birthplace of those regional revolts against authoritarianism. But the north African country’s path changed dramatically soon after Saied’s election in 2019.
The Tunisian electoral board, ISIE, has said about 9.7 million people were eligible to vote, in a country whose population is around 12 million.
Only 27.7 percent of voters turned out to cast their ballots, it said. Over 58 percent were men, and 65 percent aged between 36 and 60. “The vote’s legitimacy is undoubtedly tainted with candidates who could have overshadowed (Saied) being systematically sidelined,” said Hatem Nafti, a political commentator and author of a forthcoming book on the current president’s authoritarian rule. ISIE had barred 14 candidates from joining the race, citing insufficient endorsements, among other technicalities.
At his campaign’s office in the capital, Saied warned of “foreign interference” and pledged to “build our country and we will rid it of the corrupt and conspirators”. “The results announced by the exit polls are very close to reality,” he told national television. “We will wait for the official results.” The board is set to announce the preliminary election results on Monday.
This year’s turnout figure compared to 45 percent in 2019 and is the lowest the country has recorded in a presidential vote since its 2011 revolution.
The vote’s “democratic legitimacy is indeed weak, but there is no minimum threshold,” said north Africa analyst Pierre Vermeren. “The majority of Tunisians let it happen.”
Hosni Abidi, 40, said he feared fraud after the electoral board also barred two local independent watchdogs from monitoring the vote.
“I don’t want people to choose for me,” he said. “I want to check the box for my candidate myself.”
Saied cast his vote alongside his wife in the affluent Ennasr neighbourhood, north of Tunis, in the morning.
Shortly after the exit polls were announced, hundreds of supporters took to the street celebrating his expected win.