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TUNIS – Shortly after being elected president of Tunisia at the end of 2019, Kais Saied walked into his regular cafe in the capital as if nothing had changed.
Farouk Chihaoui, who serves shisha, or water tobacco pipes, in the cafe, could not believe his eyes. Here was the man who until recently taught university law courses, always parked outside an old Peugeot, paid his tickets and “looked exactly like the people”.
Except now, escorted by security and greeted by a massive crowd, he was its president. “I took a selfie like a friend would. Frankly, it was pretty special.”
For Chihaoui, that encounter reinforced his belief, shared by many of the president’s supporters, that Saied is one of them. On Monday, he will vote “yes” in a controversial referendum on a new constitution that Saied insists will lead Tunisia to a more prosperous future.
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Many other Tunisians believe the opposite will happen. They say Saied has spent the past year executing a protracted power grab and that his proposed constitution, released just weeks ago, was conceived through an illegitimate process. They say the referendum will only further consolidate his one-man rule and destroy the progress made since the country’s 2011 revolution toppled dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and started the Arab Spring across the Middle East.
With no minimum turnout required and many of Saied’s opponents boycotting the process out of credibility, the referendum is expected to pass. His opponents criticized his decision to speak publicly about the referendum on Monday in what they denounced as a flagrant violation of electoral silence rules. By late Monday night, election officials said turnout had topped 27 percent, a higher showing than many observers had expected.
The vote comes a year after Saied dismissed parliament and fired his prime minister, sharply dividing the country between those who celebrated his decision as necessary to end an ongoing political crisis and those who denounced it. as a coup that threatened the survival of the government. only democracy has emerged from the Arab Spring.
The move, which came amid a deadly surge in coronavirus cases and a political deadlock between the president and a divided parliament, was initially widely celebrated in Tunisia and launched Saied, a man who once seemed an unlikely candidate to wield such immense political power, in the spotlight.
His speaking style and insistence on using formal Arabic rather than the Tunisian dialect have earned him the nickname “RoboCop”. Even some of his supporters, including Chihaoui, acknowledge that he lacks the typical charisma and gregariousness that often accompanies a successful political figure.
Still, he ran for the presidency at a time when Tunisians, tired of a decade of failure to improve the economy and politicians who failed to deliver on their promises, were grateful for his status as a relative outsider in the political system and the perception of its reliability. He got 73% of the votes.
He became immensely popular last summer among those who saw his drastic steps to suspend parliament as necessary to remove corrupt or ineffective officials, including the moderate Islamist party Ennahda, once a dominant force in government.
But for some of those supporters, the popularity was short-lived. Now the country, mired in a worsening economic crisis and facing widespread political division, is grappling with what many of its former supporters see as the fallout from its earlier misguided notion.
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“It went right under everyone’s noses,” said Abderraouf Betbaieb, a retired diplomat who has known Saied for decades and was part of his inner circle before he stepped down in 2020. “He plunged the country into crisis.”
Lawyer and politician Samia Abbou was never enthralled by Saied, but was among those who applauded his unconventional intervention last July, hoping it would mark a new beginning for the country’s democracy.
But in September, when Saied announced an extension of the state of emergency and a further expansion of his powers, he felt he had gone too far off script. Then, in December, he announced that parliament would remain suspended until after a referendum in July. Finally, in March, he said that the parliament had been dissolved and that he has since replaced the members of the independent electoral commission with his own appointees.
Now, she said, she is sure the new constitution is just laying the groundwork for a “dictatorship.” “I can’t regret anything that had to happen,” he said of his support for his initial decision last July. But what came next “was done in bad faith. It wasn’t honest.”
“It managed to split people in two,” he said. “We have never experienced it, not even under Ben Ali’s regime”, referring to the dictator overthrown in 2011. “We have become fanatics, for or against. People don’t smile together anymore, even in a single family.”
Even the expert Saied commissioned to write the new constitution is among those now publicly denouncing the president and boycotting Monday’s vote, saying it would be an ethical “betrayal” for him to take part.
Sadok Belaid, the former dean of the University of Tunis’ Faculty of Law who taught Saied when he was young, agreed this spring to lead the advisory commission tasked with drafting the new legal document. He had known Saied for decades, he said, describing him as “very affable, very nice, very modest.”
For weeks, Belaid recalled, he worked tirelessly on the project. The day after he presented his full version of the new constitution, he said, he entered the hospital for an operation he had postponed to write the document.
Later that day, in his hospital bed and still under the effects of anesthesia, he said Saied visited him and handed him a stack of papers that he described as a modified version of his work.
It wasn’t until the president left that Belaid, who is 80 years old, realized he had an entirely different version of the constitution, one that Saied himself appeared to have written. The new version gives Saied more powers and reduces the influence of parliament, among other changes widely condemned by his opponents.
“It’s a real comedy” that “ends badly,” Belaid said. “The reality is that the president used this prestige he has in the eyes of the population to approve a text that does not respond to the needs or demands of the people but to his own intentions.”
Back at the cafe, Chihaoui said it was Saied’s reputation as someone “cultured” that attracted him to his candidacy. Still, in a Tunisia plagued by internal political strife, “I thought it was a dream.” He said: “A man from the people becomes president? It was not very logical.” Now that Saied is in power, he said, he supports whatever decision the president might make. “Everything he does is for the people.”
Just outside the cafe, Sami bin Mohamed, 42, a salesman, expressed a much less optimistic view. Smoking a cigarette, he lamented the worsening economic situation and said he would boycott the referendum. “Any president works for his own good,” he said. In the poorest neighborhoods, he added, “everyone plans to leave illegally. I don’t think it’s possible to fix things around here.”
In the city center on Saturday, a small crowd gathered to protest the referendum and express their support for the Ennahda party. “We are here because Mr. Kais Saied is staging a coup in Tunisia,” said 63-year-old Fathia Azaiz. “It’s changing everything,” he said. “The president is isolating himself and it’s not democratic.”
Nearby, Kawthar Guettiti, 36, a graphic designer, walked with her 6-year-old daughter, who was holding a small Tunisian flag. She will vote “yes” on Monday, she said, because she is confident that Saied intends to put the country on a stronger path for her daughter’s future. “He has a law degree. He knows very well what he is doing. He will not be a dictator any more than others,” he said.