How to defy an authoritarian? In Tunisia, election is a battle cry.

Overcoming years of division and infighting, Tunisia’s civil society and political parties are uniting to confront President Kais Saied, whose power grab since his election, observers say, is turning back the clock on the last democracy standing from the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions.

The catalyst for this newfound unity is a round of parliamentary elections being pushed through by the populist president tomorrow that dramatically reduces what’s left of Tunisia’s democracy.

Under a new, restrictive constitution, what was a multiparty parliament that drafted laws and directed policy is becoming a ceremonial chamber with little legislative powers, subservient to the president.

Independent observers warn further that the new election format is unfree and unfair, adding that the result of the elections will be a rubber-stamp parliament that will be the final nail in the coffin of their democracy.

However, the rights groups, coalitions, and political parties now joining forces to oppose Mr. Saied lack a consensus national leader around whom they can coalesce, and their main leverage, beyond protests, is to boycott Saturday’s vote and brand it as illegitimate.

Mr. Saied also still retains significant public support from citizens who bought into his anti-establishment rhetoric.

Protesters say they are nevertheless determined to prevent the last of Tunisia’s democratic institutions from falling under the increasingly autocratic president’s control.

“If political groups and civil society don’t unify, then this dictatorship will continue and we will be taken backwards to before the 2011 revolution,” says 19-year-old Suha Ben Kadim, a protester at an anti-election demonstration held by civil society groups and the National Salvation Front in downtown Tunis last Saturday. “Civil society organizations have no option but to work together as one hand.”

Electoral change

Saturday’s polls are being held to replace the parliament that steered the country and was a beacon for democracy, individual rights, and pluralism in the Arab world. Under the new constitution penned by Mr. Saied, the new chamber will have no oversight powers or power to impeach, its legislative role reduced to advising and approving laws introduced by the president.

Under the election law designed by Mr. Saied, who is openly disdainful of political parties, citizens can vote only for individual independent candidates within their district, and not for a party or national electoral list.

As a result, political parties are boycotting the election, and a group of largely unknowns – Saied supporters and loyalists – are on the ballot.

The country’s Independent Electoral Commission, once a model for the region, had its directors sacked by Mr. Saied and replaced with loyalists. The commission proceeded to approve Mr. Saied’s electoral law and regulations without review, independent Tunisian election experts say, moves that led most international observers to pass up monitoring the polls.

Mr. Saied’s government has barred international journalists from interviewing candidates, and Tunisia’s journalists union says authorities have harassed reporters and media outlets critical of the elections.

Many political liberals who supported Mr. Saied’s earlier moves to concentrate power in the presidency say this shift in election format reneges on the president’s promise of a new, inclusive, and devolved democratic system. Public figures who once supported the president are speaking out against him.

“Today, in general, civil society, political society, media, academics, and elites are all against the decisions of Kais Saied; there is much concern about these elections,” says Amine Ghali, director of Al Kawakibi Democracy Transition Center, a Tunis-based democracy nongovernmental organization.

Protests and rallies led by civil society groups and political parties have brought thousands to the streets. And activists ranging from women’s rights advocates to Islamists are canvassing, urging citizens to boycott the Saturday vote, highlighting the harm they say Mr. Saied’s restrictive system will have on their individual constituencies.

This flurry of activity comes 17 months after Mr. Saied assumed emergency powers under the pretext of the COVID-19 pandemic – in what was then termed a “constitutional coup” – before he scrapped the constitution altogether and wrote a new one himself.

Blunting expressions of concern over Tunisia’s rapid backslide toward dictatorship was the fact that Mr. Saied’s power grab was widely popular among a public fatigued with political infighting and alleged corruption by political parties. Large swaths of the public also have bought into his conspiracy-oriented narrative that political parties and a deep state were to blame for Tunisia’s woes even after he took power.

The president’s bitterly divided opponents were slow to act after the “coup,” wary of turning the public against themselves.

Shift in sentiment

But now conditions, and the public mood, have changed.

A deepening economic crisis is on Tunisians’ minds, not Mr. Saied’s maneuvers, with inflation and chronic food shortages hitting every household.

Supermarket shelves are empty. Citizens rush to grocery stores to compete for a few bags of sugar, semolina, or a milk carton. Inflation is at a record 9.8%.

Amid mounting public debt and the government’s mismanagement of supply chains, Mr. Saied has been unable, so far, to secure a badly needed International Monetary Fund loan.

On Thursday, the IMF delayed to January a final decision on a $1.9 billion loan agreed upon with Tunisia.

Civil society groups have been trying to capitalize on the economic discontent to win back the trust of people whose patience with the president is beginning to wear but who had been disenchanted with political parties’ failures to improve living conditions prior to the coup.

“We won the battle of the street; we showed that the majority of Tunisians are really against the president’s project,” says Marwan Bahi, a law student and university activist attending last Saturday’s preelection protest, “but today a national project is needed to get us rid of this catastrophe.”

Tunisia’s General Labor Union, a coalition representing 1 million workers that helped bring down former strongman Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali 11 years ago and had been working with Mr. Saied to encourage a return to the “democratic path,” came out against the elections and the president’s agenda last week.

“We no longer accept the current path because of its ambiguity and individual rule, and the unpleasant surprises it lays in store for the fate of the country and democracy,” union secretary-general Noureddine Taboubi said in a Dec. 2 speech to thousands of unionists.

Boycott, delegitimize

The focus of Mr. Saied’s opponents across the board is to delegitimize Saturday’s elections and the resulting parliament.

Tunisian parliament and elections monitor Al Bawsala was one of many independent watchdogs that announced its refusal to monitor and legitimize polls that it said would be neither free nor fair, citing the replacement of Independent Electoral Commission officials with Saied loyalists and the changing of election rules without review.

“Al Bawsala refuses to stand witness to the path to one-man rule and a cartoon parliament,” it said Wednesday. 

It called on the Tunisian public to “boycott the institution of the next parliament and refuse it a veneer of legitimacy,” adding that it “urges all citizens, men and women, to resist the path of a consolidating authoritarian regime and attempts to return Tunisia backwards to a pre-revolution dictatorship.”

Yet analysts question whether civil society groups and rights advocates can undo a now-entrenched autocratic state with all the democratic institutions compromised.

“I see more of these civil society groups coming together, but at the same time I see these groups becoming weaker and more marginalized,” says Youssef Cherif, director of the Columbia Global Centers-Tunis.

The political parties achieved unity, he says, only after they became “irrelevant and practically nonexistent.”

Unity, but no alternative

Meanwhile, no viable opposition figure has emerged as an alternative to Mr. Saied; Tunisia’s politicians are mostly deeply unpopular and polarizing among the general public.

“Civil society groups can come together as one voice, but they are not providing an alternative to Kais Saied, which means he can continue what he is doing and no one can stop him,” says Mr. Cherif. “Most of the powers are now in the hands of the president, and the parliament will resemble most Arab parliaments: an echo chamber that cannot change politics or remove the president,” he adds.

“After the dissolving of parliament, the passage of a new constitution, and the closure of independent institutions, it may be too late for this united rejection,” adds Mr. Ghali.

Yet with the memory of the Ben Ali dictatorship fresh in the minds of many, Tunisians vow that their resistance will only increase as Mr. Saied solidifies his one-man rule.

“I can’t be quiet today because I have family members who faced injustice and died because of injustice,” Ms. Ben Kadim, the student protester, says of the previous regime. “I see those things may be repeated again.”

Ahmed Ellali contributed to this report from Tunis.