TUNIS – The official start of the presidential campaign season in Tunisia began on Saturday, a day after Tunisians took their anger to the streets of the capital to decry what protesters say is the deteriorating state of the country.
In what appeared to be the largest protest since authorities began a monthslong wave of arrests earlier this year, hundreds of Tunisians marched peacefully on Friday and called for an end to what they called a police state.
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“We’re here to say no and show that we don’t all agree with what’s really happening in the country,” Khaled Ben Abdeslam, a father and urban development consultant, told The Associated Press.
In 2011, longtime Tunisian President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was toppled by nationwide protests that unleashed revolt across the Arab world.
More than a decade later, Ben Abdelslam said he was worried about the growing number of political figures who’ve been thrown in jail under President Kais Saied and said he wants to ensure Tunisia “turns the page” for the good of his kids.
“Nobody dares to say or do anything anymore today,” he said as protesters neared Tunisia’s powerful Interior Ministry.
He and other demonstrators slammed both Tunisia’s economic and political woes, carrying signs that grouped together the growing costs of staple items and growing concerns about civil liberties.
“Where is sugar? Where is oil? Where is freedom? Where is democracy?” signs read.
Some carried posters telling the government that “human rights are not optional” while others revived the popular slogans that mobilized Tunisia’s masses against Ben Ali.
This time though, they directed scorn toward Saied.
The protests capped off a week in which the North African country’s largest opposition party, Ennahda, said its senior members had been arrested en masse, at a scale not previously seen.
They come as Saied prepares to campaign for reelection on Oct. 6, when he will ask voters to grant him a second term.
When first elected in 2019, Saied used anti-corruption promises to win over people disillusioned with the political controversies that plagued Tunisia’s young democracy in the years that followed the Arab Spring.
Since taking office, the 66-year-old former law professor has gone to lengths to consolidate his own power, freezing the country’s parliament and rewriting the constitution. Throughout his tenure, authorities have arrested journalists, activists, civil society figures and political opponents across the ideological spectrum.
And though he promised to chart a new course for the country, its unemployment rate has steadily increased to one of the region’s highest at 16%, with young Tunisians hit particularly hard.
The economy continues to face significant challenges, yet Saied has managed to energize supporters with populist rhetoric, often accusing migrants from sub-Saharan Africa of violence and crime and aiming at changing the country’s demography.
In the months leading up to his reelection bid, the political crackdown has expanded.
His opponents have been arrested, placed under gag order or faced criminal investigations that observers have called politically motivated. Figures who said they planned to challenge him have been sentenced for breaking campaign finance laws. Others have been ruled ineligible to challenge him by Tunisia’s election authority.
Even those the authority approved have later faced arrest.
Ayachi Zammel, a businessman planning to challenge Saied, was promptly arrested after being announced as one of the two candidates approved to appear on the ballot alongside Saied. His attorney, Abdessattar Messaoudi, told The Associated Press that she feared a court may bar him from politics for life as it had done to other Saied challengers.
The Tunisian Network for the Defense of Rights and Freedoms — a newly formed coalition of civil society groups and political parties — organized Friday’s protest to draw attention to what it called a surge of authoritarianism.
Outrage swelled among many members of the network after the country’s election authority — made up of Saied appointees — dismissed a court ruling ordering it to reinstate three challengers to Saied.
The authority has defied judges who have ruled in favor of candidates who have appealed its decisions and pledged not to allow Mondher Zenaidi, Abdellatif El Mekki and Imed Daimi to appear on the ballot alongside Saied next month.
In less than a month, Tunisian voters are expected to cast their choice in the Oct. 6 poll, amid spreading worrying and doubts about the country’s political future.
Hajer Mohamed, a 33-year-old law firm assistant said that she and her friends were terrified about the direction Tunisia was heading in ways they couldn’t have imagined when people rejoiced the freedoms won 13 years ago.
“We never thought that after the 2011 revolution we’d live to see the country’s suffocating situation,” she said. “even under former dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the situation wasn’t as scandalous as it is today.”
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Sam Metz contributed to this report from Rabat, Morocco.