CAIRO — Tunisians voted in a referendum Monday on a new constitution that would significantly expand the powers of a president who for the past year has pushed other branches of government aside to rule alone.
If passed, the referendum will enshrine the steps President Kais Saied took just a year ago to take power into his own hands, weaken parliament and other controls on the president, and give the head of state ultimate authority. to form a government, appoint judges, and propose laws.
Such changes, opponents say, would spell the end of the democratic system Tunisia has built after it overthrew its dictatorship a decade ago, when anti-government protests in a small Tunisian town sparked uprisings in the Middle East. The new constitution would return Tunisia to a presidential system similar to the one it had under Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the authoritarian ruler who was ousted during the Arab Spring uprising in 2011.
Mr Saied has said the changes are necessary to cleanse the country of corruption and end the paralysis of its political system.
After a rushed draft process that largely ruled out the opposition, the structure and even the timing of the referendum were strongly in favor of the new constitution, endorsed and written in part by Mr Saied. Most major political parties urged supporters to boycott the vote, raising expectations that turnout would be low. The results are expected on Tuesday.
Tunisia was the only country to be swept away during the Arab Spring to establish a democracy, albeit a fragile and often dysfunctional one. It has successfully held three free and fair elections, written a well-regarded and inclusive constitution, established independent institutions and guaranteed freedom of expression and of the press.
However, it failed to increase economic opportunities or clean up corruption.
The post-revolutionary era now seems to be over.
The 2014 constitution, passed three years after Ben Ali’s fall, divided power between the president and parliament in an attempt to limit a president’s authority.
The new constitution retains most of the clauses of the 2014 Constitution related to rights and freedoms, but it relegates parliament to the status of a secondary department, with only the president empowered to appoint the prime minister, cabinet and judges. Parliament’s ability to withdraw the government’s confidence has been weakened.
The president can declare a state of emergency in the event of “imminent danger” with no time limit or oversight, and there is no provision to remove him.
If mr. Saied triumphs, it should come as no surprise. His opponents pointed out that he controls the previously independent electoral authority and the committee that drafted the new constitution, and that no minimum participation in the referendum was required for it to pass.
Those campaigning against the proposal said the entire process had been twisted in Saied’s favor. Several anti-referendum meetings were canceled by local officials for security reasons, government ministers appointed by Mr Saied approved the draft and Mr Saied himself twice urged the public to vote yes.
In the run-up to the vote, government-funded television and radio stations spent a lot of airtime beating proponents while excluding most opponents. Security forces met anti-Saied protests of several hundred people over the weekend with pepper spray, shoves and arrests.
The date of the referendum in July meant that many well-educated Tunisians on summer vacation had to vote.
“The people who are pushing ‘yes’, the whole government and all the pro-Saied forces are deeply organized, and the other side that wants to say no is not necessarily in the city,” said Fadhel Abdelkefi, Afek’s president. Tounes, one of the few political parties that decided to take part in the vote.
“If you have the president pushing people to vote and the whole city is under the ads telling people to vote yes, that’s a really unfair situation,” he added.
The vote took place on the first anniversary of the day Mr Saied sacked his prime minister and suspended parliament amid nationwide protests over the crumbling economy and the government’s failed response to the coronavirus pandemic.
A year ago, cheering crowds overflowed Tunis, the capital, greeting Mr Saied as a savior and his seizure of power as a much-needed remedy for Tunisia’s corrupt, floundering political system.
By contrast, in July most Tunisians were lethargic and aloof, paying little heed to Mr Saied’s calls for their support in the vote. Relentless heat kept them in; summer vacation she kept on the beach; Urgent concerns about high prices and low wages as the country’s economy slides further into ruin kept some too busy to vote. So political reform was not a major concern, analysts said.
“We are talking about the fate of a nation here, yet many people have lost interest and confidence in this whole process,” said Amine Ghali, director of the Al Kawakibi Democracy Transition Center in Tunis.
The run-up to the referendum had the odds in Mr. Saied magnified that “this is already manipulation,” said Mr. ghali.
If turnout is low, it would reflect growing disenchantment with the president, if not outright opposition.
Saied had called on Tunisians to vote yes “to correct the course of the revolution”, as he had promised to do when he took power last July. But many Tunisians who chanted for opportunity, dignity and freedom during the 2011 uprising have seen those ideals fall less and less over the past year.
Hugely popular a year ago, Mr Saied blew support as he prioritized political reform over the failing economy, even as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spiked the prices of bread and other staple foods and exacerbated hardships for many Tunisians.
Many political activists, civil society members, judges, lawyers and political parties initially supported Mr Saied’s actions. But he lost their support after he took office by decree, arrested opponents, tried them in military court and put his own appointees in charge of previously independent government agencies, including the electoral authority.
A survey commissioned by an international organization found that the percentage of respondents who had a very favorable opinion of him fell by almost 20 points from November to May. The same poll, which was conducted before the opposition started calling for a boycott, found that less than 30 percent of Tunisians strongly intended to participate in the referendum. That was seven points less than in February, the last time the question was asked.
An early concrete sign that Tunisians were rejecting Mr Saied’s political proposals came in March, when less than 5 percent of Tunisians took part in an online survey on national priorities.
Undeterred, Mr Saied soon appointed a committee of constitutional law experts to draft a new constitution. There was some early backlash from members who said their names had appeared on the committee list despite not agreeing to join. Some of Mr Saied’s former allies rejected the process because of what they said was its lack of inclusiveness.
But the panel produced a draft within weeks.
It contrasted sharply with the 2014 constitution, which has been debated by an elected assembly for more than two years.
In late May, the Venice Commission, an advisory body to the Council of Europe made up of independent constitutional experts, said the drafting of the constitution was neither legitimate nor credible. Mr Saied responded by berating the group and then expelling its members from Tunisia.
After reviewing the proposed constitution, Mr Saied came forward in late June with a version that gave the president even more powers than the previous version. Even the expert Mr. Saied had chosen to write the original draft, Sadoc Belaid, warned that the modified version would “pave the way for a disgraceful dictatorship.”
Still, the president remained Tunisia’s most trusted leader earlier this year, according to the international organization’s May poll.
The lowest rating of all Tunisian leaders in the poll went to the head of Ennahda, the Islamist political party that dominated parliament before Saied dissolved it. Many Tunisians hold the party with widespread disdain, blaming it for a decade of government dysfunction.
This partly explains the weak support for the referendum, according to analysts. Pro-Saied voices warned before the vote that if it failed, Ennahda would return to power and impose its conservative Islamist ideology on the country, invoking a bogeyman who has scared many Tunisians since the days of the dictatorship.
But even with a new constitution, the deadlock over Saied’s reforms, his legitimacy and his failure so far to recover the economy means Tunisia is likely to remain mired in crisis, analysts say.
“This seems to be a vanity project for him, but now what?” said Gordon Gray, a fellow at the Center for American Progress who served as U.S. ambassador to Tunisia from 2009 to 2012. “What is the social contract that Saied offers? In short, it is not rights and no economic growth, which is not the most attractive. So how do Tunisians react to that, is the question.”
