Back to the Future

Listen to Today's Edition:

A court in Tunisia on Monday sentenced four potential challengers of President Kais Saied to prison and banned them from running for office, a move critics said was aimed at ensuring the incumbent’s reelection in the Oct. 6 presidential vote, Middle East Eye reported.

The ruling targeted opposition politicians Abdel Latif Mekki and Adel Dou, activist Nizar Chaari, and judge Mourad Massoudi. All four received eight-month jail sentences on charges of buying votes.

“It is a shocking rule, it aims to keep us away from running for the race after a series of restrictions,” Chaari told Reuters.

Another politician, Abir Moussi, was sentenced to two years in prison later on Monday. A critic of Saied, Moussi was arrested in October 2023 and convicted of insulting the country’s electoral body.

Judges used Decree 54, a law Saied introduced in 2022 to combat the spread of false information, on which to base their rulings. Critics have said the decree was used to censor political dissent.

The rulings highlight how the Tunisian government is cracking down on the opposition and civil society to secure another term for Saied, who critics say has destroyed the nascent democracy Tunisia developed in the wake of the revolution in 2011, the Guardian wrote. Then, mass protests forced a longtime dictator to flee the country and gave birth to the so-called Arab Spring.

Elected in 2019, however, the little-known professor dissolved parliament two years later and began to rule by decree, a move observers described as a coup. Since then, he has reconstituted the legislature with allies.

On Sunday, he officially confirmed he was running for reelection and denied trying to suppress rivals.

“There are no restrictions on potential candidates for the presidential elections (…) this is nonsense and lies,” Saied said.