Tunisia’s Election Boycott
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8.8% of the roughly nine-million-strong electorate had voted in the parliamentary elections.
11% of the electorate voted in Tunisia’s parliamentary runoffs. Sunday’s runoff vote was however higher than December’s first round, which had a participation rate of 8.8%.
887,000 voters cast ballots from a total electorate of 7.8 million, the electoral commission said.
“We don’t want elections. We want milk and sugar and cooking oil,” said Hasna, a woman shopping in the Ettadamon district of Tunis
After reaching a preliminary agreement with the IMF to secure a $1.9bn loan and finance the 2023 budget last year, Saied’s government is now gearing up to implement ravaging new austerity measures the financial institution presented as a prerequisite to sealing the deal. These policies will likely include the complete elimination of food and fuel subsidies, the slashing of public health, education, and social protection spending, and the privatisation of key public companies.
History suggests Saied’s decision to adopt austerity policies dictated by the IMF will sooner or later sound the death knell for his authoritarian and undemocratic regime.
Tunisians will once again rise to try and save their democracy and ensure that they remain able to put food on their tables. Another Tunisian uprising is in the making.
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/1/30/tunisias-democratic-backsliding-its-the-economy-stupid
More on the Tunisian Ghost Election
https://www.dw.com/en/after-tunisias-ghost-election-what-comes-next/a-64570028
“He promised serious reforms but we haven’t seen anything,” she said. “People have had it with these promises and that’s why they boycotted the last two elections. They don’t believe this regime is going to find an answer to their problems, especially their economic problems.”
Tunisian trade unions have held protests across the country over worsening economic woes and the arrest of a top union official.
Demonstrators chanted “Tunisia is not for sale!” and “No to removing subsidies!”
Protesters demanded the release of UGTT official Anis Kaabi, who was arrested on January 31 following a strike by toll barrier workers, in what the union has described as “a blow to union work and a violation of union rights”.
Tunisia expelled the head of the European Trade Union Confederation. Saied declared Esther Lynch, who is Irish, persona non grata. Lynch had addressed the crowd in Sfax, delivering a message of “solidarity from 45 million workers around Europe”.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/2/18/tunisia-unions-protest-over-economic-woes-officials-arrest
Saied plays the racist immigrant card
Saied called for urgent action to halt the flow of sub-Saharan migrants into the country. “The undeclared goal of the successive waves of illegal immigration is to consider Tunisia a purely African country that has no affiliation to the Arab and Islamic nations,” he said, going on to accuse unnamed parties of complicity in a “criminal arrangement made since the beginning of this century to alter the demographic structure of Tunisia”.
Making immigrants the scapegoats
Tunisian law enforcement has launched a wave of repression against the country’s sub-Saharan African population, carrying out random identity checks and sometimes violently arresting them, leaving their children abandoned and offering no access to any kind of legal support. Xenophobic and racist sentiments have also been circulating widely on Tunisian social media, a toxic climate that recent statements by the Tunisian president only exacerbated.
The Tunisian Nationalist Party promotes the “great replacement theory”, championed by the extreme right in both Europe and the United States, with what they call the “sub-Saharan invasion”
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