Tunis, Oct 14, 2019  – Conservative political outsider Kais Saied has won Tunisia’s presidential election by a landslide taking 72.71 percent of the votes, the North African country’s electoral commission said Monday. Saied garnered 2.7 million votes against one million received by his rival business tycoon Nabil Karoui in Sunday’s runoff, the commission said. The vote — the second presidential election since 2014 — reflected Tunisia’s shifting political landscape since the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that ousted an autocratic regime.

Saied, a retired law professor with a rigid and austere demeanour that earned him the nickname “Robocop”, was carried to victory by young voters, wooed by his anti-establishment platform. Around 90 percent of 18- to 25-year-olds voted for Saied, according to estimates by the Sigma polling institute, compared with 49.2 percent of voters over 60.

According to Tunisian law, the results can still be appealed within two weeks before the new president is sworn in at the end of the month. The electoral commission ISIE said turnout was 55 percent, slightly lower from an initial figure of 58 percent announced Sunday after the runoff. It noted however that turnout was higher than during the first round on September 15.

Saied, a 61-year-old constitutional law expert, campaigned on the values of the 2011 revolution, based on opposition to Westernised and corrupt elites, and in favour of radical decentralisation. The poll, Tunisia’s second free presidential election since its 2011 revolt, followed the death of president Beji Caid Essebsi in July.

PROFILE

By Caroline Nelly Perrot – Political newcomer Kais Saied, who won a landslide victory Sunday in Tunisia’s presidential election runoff, is a conservative academic whose rigid manner has earned him the nickname “Robocop”. According to exit polls, Saied delivered a stunning defeat to rival upstart Nabil Karoui, taking almost 77 percent of the vote, according to Wataniya television, quoting exit polls by Sigma Conseil.

The anti-establishment Saied is seen as uptight and unwavering, but beneath his austere style is a commitment to socially conservative views and to decentralising Tunisia’s political system. He has defended the death penalty, criminalisation of homosexuality and a sexual assault law that punishes unmarried couples who engage in public displays of affection.

Born in Tunis on February 22, 1958 into a middle-class family, Saied is an expert on constitutional law who taught at the Tunis faculty of judicial and political sciences from 1999 to 2018. He retired last year, and launched an unorthodox election campaign that saw him shun mass rallies and focus instead on door-to-door canvassing for votes.

– The ‘professor’ –

Some of his supporters still address him as “professor” — even though he has few published works and never earned a PhD. He has two daughters and a son. His wife, a judge, has remained behind the scenes through much of his campaign. Saied has been nicknamed “Robocop” because of his rigid self-presentation and speech and posture and expressionless demeanour. But several of his former students have praised Saied, saying that beneath his tough exterior is a devoted teacher. “He could spend hours outside class time explaining a lesson or helping us understand why we’d received a certain grade on an exam,” one of his students tweeted. He was “a serious teacher, sometimes theatrical, but always available and ready to listen”, said Nessim Ben Gharbia, a journalist who took a course with Saied from September 2011 to June 2012.

– ‘Not an Islamist’ –

Among his supporters are activists he met during the 2011 protests that raged following the ouster of dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, demanding a complete overhaul of the political system. Saied became a household name when he became a regular political commentator on TV during the drafting of the constitution adopted in 2014. Among his policy pledges are a radical decentralisation of power, along with the creation of a new network of elected local councils led by officials who would face the sack if they abuse their power.

In an online video, he is seen defending his vision as a roadmap to ensure “that the will of the people reaches all the way up through the highest ranks of the central government, and to put an end to corruption”. The support he has built has been buoyed by a broad rejection among voters of the post-Arab Spring political establishment. 

While Tunisia has succeeded in curbing jihadist attacks that rocked the key tourist sector in 2015, its economy remains hampered by austere International Monetary Fund-backed reforms.

In his own no-frills life, Saied appears to embody the anti-corruption message he seeks to spread: he lives in a middle-class neighbourhood in Tunis and his office is housed in a run-down flat in the heart of the capital. And while he makes no secret of his conservative views, he says he would respect the social freedoms enshrined in law in recent years that civil society groups have hailed as victories.

“We will not backpedal on the rights we have gained in terms of our freedoms, in terms of women’s rights,” Saied has said. Yet he rejects a bid to overhaul Tunisia’s inheritance law — which remains based on Islamic law, meaning that women inherit half of their male siblings’ part. But experts refute that he is an Islamist. “He is indeed an ultra-conservative, but he is no Islamist. He does not make his personal convictions his priorities,” constitutional law expert and Saied’s former teacher Iyadh Ben Achour told French newspaper La Croix in a
recent interview.

By AFP