Kais Saied

Kais Saied has been president of Tunisia since 2019, and has dismantled most of the democratic settlement the country built after the revolution of 2011. He spent his career as a constitutional lawyer, teaching public law and heading the Tunisian Association of Constitutional Law from 1995. That made him a familiar face on television during the drafting of the 2014 constitution. He entered the 2019 presidential election as an independent with no party and almost no campaign, running on austere personal probity and a plan to push power downwards to local councils. He won the run-off with nearly seventy-three per cent of the vote against the media proprietor Nabil Karoui. His formal manner and classical Arabic earned him the nickname Robocop. Faced with a fractious parliament, an economy in difficulty and protests over policing and the pandemic, he invoked Article 80 of the constitution on 25 July 2021, suspended parliament and dismissed the prime minister. His critics and most outside observers describe the step as a self-coup. He then ruled by decree, dissolved the Supreme Judicial Council and dismissed dozens of judges. A new constitution concentrating power in the presidency passed by referendum in July 2022 on a turnout of about thirty per cent. Opposition figures, journalists and judges have since been arrested, several under a decree criminalising the spread of false news. He was re-elected in 2024 with most serious challengers excluded from the ballot. Tunisia had been the one state to emerge from the Arab Spring with a functioning democracy.

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