There is something depressing in observing, ballot after ballot, the electoral lethargy in which Tunisia is sinking. This North African society which had so fascinated more than a decade ago by its pioneering role in the wave of the “Arab Springs”, laboratory of a unique democratic experiment in the region, is breaking records. global electoral abstention.
The second round of legislative elections held on Sunday January 29 was shunned by nearly 89% of voters, as many as in the first round. In July 2022, nearly 70% of them had turned away from the referendum on the new hyper-presidentialist Constitution concocted by the Head of State, Kaïs Saïed. Disinterest, fatalism, resignation or militant boycott: Tunisia seems to be inexorably disintegrating into a citizen anomie, this dissolution of the frameworks of belonging to a political community, fraught with danger.
Such is the ransom of the personal adventure in which Kaïs Saïed has embarked the country since his July 2021 coup. Elected two years earlier as head of state in favor of an anti-system vote, the tenant of the palace of Carthage then invoked “imminent peril” to assume full powers and begin the methodical deconstruction of the institutional architecture resulting from the 2014 Constitution, which is predominantly parliamentary.
Kaïs Saïed had benefited, it is true, from the initial support of a population exasperated by a parliamentary game that had become dysfunctional against a background of socio-economic regression. He embodied the hope of a return to the popular aspirations of revolution betrayed by a corrupt and incompetent ruling elite.
An unreal bubble
The Tunisians, however, were quick to become disillusioned, once again. Behind his rhetorical populism, the head of state has locked himself in a personal power that is narrower every day. He operates in an unreal bubble where incantation takes the place of action, where magical thinking – tinged with messianism – is worth a political project. On the one hand, it is proving powerless to lift an economy on the verge of bankruptcy, hanging on the prospect of a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. On the other hand, his autocratic drift continues to tear apart the democratic pact which had been sealed, albeit in an imperfect mode, in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. The desertion from the ballot box has its source there. What’s the point of going to vote for an Assembly that will be largely impotent?
However, the ambient anomie does not prelude the imminent collapse of Kaïs Saïed. The opposition parties are still too disqualified to claim to offer a credible short-term successor. Civil society organizations, which seem to be waking up around the UGTT union, still have a long way to go to reconnect with the people.
As for the Western chancelleries, certainly worried about attacks on the rule of law, they are not ready to let go of Kaïs Saïed in the current circumstances, at the risk of opening up an even more perilous vacuum in their eyes. The repetitive abstentions of recent months nevertheless sound the alarm: the legitimacy of the Head of State is shrinking over the weeks. This new perception, inside and outside Tunisia, is fraught with readjustments to come. Everyone should be aware of this.
