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The Tunisian electoral authority announced on Tuesday the preliminary result of the referendum on the new Constitution. It received the support of 94% of voters, with a turnout rate of 27%. The constitutional text will give greater powers to the president and could mean “the end of the democratic experiment started in Tunisia after the 2011 revolution.”
94.6% of the voters who voted on Monday July 25 in Tunisia said “yes” to the draft of the new Constitution.
The new text undoes the parliamentary system that was in force since 2014, in the Constitution drafted after the revolution in the cradle of the Arab Spring.
Tunisia is suffering from an economic crisis aggravated by the war in Ukraine, on which it depends for its wheat imports. The country, moreover, has been highly polarized since Kais Saied was elected in 2019. The president concentrated all powers in his command on July 25, 2021 and for his detractors, the entire process is encompassed in an authoritarian drift of the president.
“It is the end of the cycle of the democratic experiment started in Tunisia after the 2011 revolution and the definitive discredit of democracy. The most serious thing is that the Constitution concentrates all powers in the Presidency. It questions the balance of powers, the independence of the Judiciary,” Iván Martin, a specialist in the Mediterranean and the Maghreb at the Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, explains to RFI.
The opposition questions this excessive presidentialism of the new Magna Carta. He had called for a boycott of the referendum, which could explain a participation rate of 27.54%.
Support from various sectors of the population
The leader of the opposition coalition, the National Salvation Front, Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, asked the head of state to organize early general elections.
“Tunisia has entered a new phase,” the Tunisian president said after the vote. Kais Saied “had great popular support after July 25, 2021, when he basically repealed the existing constitutional text and arrogated all powers to himself. Several sectors of Tunisian society have supported him, including a modernizing westernized fringe, which sees in him a retaining wall against Islamism”, Martin points out.
The authorities have a month to announce the final results of the elections. The new Constitution will then enter into force. Legislative elections are scheduled for next December 17.
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