Tunisia’s Saied wins presidential election

Saied takes 90.7 percent of the vote on 28.8 percent turnout, commission says.

Tunisian President Kais Saied has won a second term in the presidential election, the electoral commission says.

Saied won 90.7 percent of the vote, the head of the Independent High Authority for Elections of Tunisia (ISIE) said on national television on Monday.

The ISIE said voter turnout stood at 28.8 percent in Sunday’s election, the lowest since the 2011 revolution. The commission’s spokesman, Mohamed Tlili Mansri, said earlier that it was expecting it to be about 30 percent.

Saied, 66, ran against two rivals, ally-turned-critic and Chaab Party leader Zouhair Maghzaoui and Ayachi Zammel, a businessman who was seen as posing a challenge to Saied’s re-election until he was jailed last month.

Saied, in power since 2019, has presided over a wave of arrests targeting the political opposition and other critics.

Tunisia for years had been hailed as the only relative success story of the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings for introducing a competitive, though flawed democracy after decades of hardline rule characterised by human rights abuses and corruption.

Rights groups say Saied has undone many of those democratic gains while removing institutional and legal checks on his power.

Senior figures from the biggest parties, which largely oppose Saied, have been imprisoned over the past year, and those parties did not publicly back any of the three candidates on Sunday’s ballot. Other opponents were also barred from running.

Imprisoned figures include Abir Moussi, head of the Free Constitutional Party, which critics accuse of wanting to bring back the government that was removed in 2011.

Several other presidential contenders are also behind bars, including Ayachi Zammel, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Tuesday on election-related offences.

In 2021, Saied dissolved the elected parliament and rewrote the constitution in a move the opposition called a coup.

But Saied has rejected criticism of his actions, saying he is fighting a “corrupt elite” and “traitors”.

In his first comments since exit polls on Sunday predicted his win, Saied told state television: “This is a continuation of the revolution.”

“We will build and will cleanse the country of the corrupt, traitors and conspirators,” he said.