According to the electoral commission, Tunisia’s Saied wins the presidential election | Election News

According to the commission, Saied received 90.7 percent of the vote with a turnout of 28.8 percent.

According to the electoral commission, Tunisian President Kais Saied has won a second term in office in the presidential election.

Saied won 90.7 percent of the vote, the head of Tunisia’s Independent High Authority for Elections (ISIE) said on national television on Monday.

According to ISIE, voter turnout in Sunday’s election was 28.8 percent, the lowest level since the 2011 revolution. Commission spokesman Mohamed Tlili Mansri previously said it was expecting around 30 percent.

Saied, 66, was running against two rivals, Chaab Party ally and critic Zouhair Maghzaoui and Ayachi Zammel, a businessman who was considered a challenge to Saied’s re-election until his jailing last month.

Saied, in power since 2019, led a wave of arrests against the political opposition and other critics.

For years, Tunisia was hailed as the sole relative success story of the 2011 “Arab Spring” uprisings for ushering in a competitive, if flawed, democracy after decades of hardline rule marked by human rights abuses and corruption.

Human rights groups say Saied has undone many of those democratic gains while removing institutional and legal checks on his power.

Senior figures from the largest parties that largely oppose Saied were jailed last year, and those parties did not publicly support any of the three candidates in Sunday’s vote. Other opponents were also prevented from running.

Among the detained figures is Abir Moussi, leader of the Free Constitution Party, who critics accuse of wanting to bring back the government that fell in 2011.

Several other presidential candidates are also behind bars, including Ayachi Zammel, who was sentenced to 12 years in prison on Tuesday for electoral offenses.

In 2021, Saied dissolved the elected parliament and rewrote the constitution, in what the opposition called a coup.

But Saied rejected criticism of his actions, saying he was fighting a “corrupt elite” and “traitors.”

In his first comments since election polls predicted his victory on Sunday, Saied told state television: “This is a continuation of the revolution.”

“We will rebuild the country and cleanse it of the corrupt, traitors and conspirators,” he said.