Populist Authoritarian Rule by Other Means: Unpolitics,Lawfare,and Electoral Legitimacy in Tunisia’s 2024 Presidential Elections

Abstract

President Kais Saied’s victory in the Tunisian presidential elections on 6 October 2024 could be interpreted, rather than as a simple slide toward authoritarianism, as a structured strategy combining two logics: a form of populist unpolitics based on the personalization of power, the dramatization of a direct link between the people and their leader, and the delegitimization of dissent, and a domestic lawfare that functions as a form of discriminatory legalism that depoliticizes elections. These two dimensions have rarely been combined in analyses of authoritarian populism: in Tunisia, they appear to be intertwined.

Keywords

Populism competitive authoritarianism elections polarization conspiracy Tunisia

Introduction

The Tunisian presidential election of 6 October 2024 crystallized the authoritarian turn launched by President Kais Saied after his 25 July 2021 coup. Excluding major opponents, suppressing pluralist debate, and marked by very low turnout, the contest functioned as a plebiscite to consecrate the leader. In stark contrast to the hopes of the 2011 “revolution” and the competitive electoral experiences that followed (the 2011 Constituent Assembly; the 2014 and 2019 legislative and presidential elections; the 2018 municipal elections) (Govantes et al., 2025), the 2024 vote signals an authoritarian reconfiguration of Tunisia’s political field—grounded in the procedural disqualification of rivals, the prevalence of unpolitics as a political disposition, and the ratification of the incumbent’s “Caesarism.”

Rather than a mere slide toward authoritarianism, this article reads the process as a structured strategy combining two logics: First, what Taggart (2019) defines as a form of populist unpolitics—grounded in the personalization of power, the dramatization of a direct link between the people and their representative, and the delegitimization of dissent through a set of tropes and discursive framings that resonate with the rejection of politics as practiced within liberal representative democracy. Second, what Pinos and Hau (2023) identify as a domestic lawfare—the strategic use of law as a political weapon—which operates as a form of discriminatory legalism that depoliticizes the election by using law as an instrument of arbitrary exclusion. These two dimensions have rarely been combined in analyses of authoritarian populism. Yet, in the Tunisian case, they appear to be deeply intertwined.

The 2024 Tunisian presidential election thus invites a renewal of analytical frameworks for authoritarian populism in post-revolutionary settings. It illuminates contemporary modes of depoliticization through law and shows how populism can manifest as unpolitical forms of electoral Caesarism, combining mobilizing frames with political disengagement. In this perspective, lawfare appears as a marker of the passage from the rule of law to authoritarianism—legitimated by the discursive framing of unpolitics.

Methodologically, the article draws on insights from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as its main methodological orientation (Van Dijk, 2013). CDA examines discourse as a social practice through which power relations and political legitimacy are constructed and contested, and emphasizes the systematic contextualization of statements within their institutional, historical, and political settings. Applied to the Tunisian case, this approach enables an analysis of how Kais Saied’s legalistic and populist rhetoric delegitimizes representative institutions, redefines popular sovereignty, and discursively legitimizes the concentration of executive authority in the name of crisis management and anti-corruption.

Empirically, this article relies primarily on data produced by the Presidency of the Republic and by Tunisian media outlets. First, it examines statements and speeches by Kais Saied relating to the presidential election in 2024. It then analyses the Constitution and decree-laws laws concerning elections and the decree-law 54 dated 13 September 2022 on combating crimes related to information and communication systems. Finally, it consults the online legal information Website, Legal Agenda, the press, and a range of audio-visual media covering Kais Saied’s public action. It also draws on a series of informal interviews with three senior civil servants, seven political and civil society activists, and several lawyers previously encountered during earlier fieldwork.

The article proceeds in four parts. Part I presents the theoretical scaffolding—unpolitics and domestic lawfare—and their relevance to Tunisia, situating them within debates on populism’s alignment with authoritarianism and the centrality of presidential elections to populist legitimation. Part II analyzes the legal, judicial, and administrative mechanisms that neutralized opponents, closed the electoral arena, and converted the vote into a plebiscite. Part III examines the president-candidate’s political behavior characterized by refusal to campaign, claims to embody a direct moral bond with the people, and recourse to religious, martial, and conspiratorial tropes characteristic of unpolitics (Taggart, 2019). Part IV assesses the political significance of the election in light of its low turnout, underscoring the limits of the plebiscitary strategy and the ambivalences of electoral authoritarianism in Tunisia, and asking how this outcome aligns with another facet of unpolitics: popular rejection of representative-democratic politics that inclines citizens toward the authoritarian populism of a virtuous leader.

Analytical frameworks: authoritarian populism, unpolitics, and domestic lawfare

Populism and the trajectory of electoral authoritarianism

Since the late 20th century, the resurgence of populism has generated a vast body of scholarship in political science (Mudde, 2004). While most scholars concur that populist leaders now gain power through elections and continue to rely on them as a means of validating popular adherence to their leadership, a central question persists: can populism be democratic, or does it inevitably drift toward authoritarianism? (Kaltwasser, 2011; Urbinati, 2019a).

The recurring use of elections allows populist leaders to claim alignment with the fundamental principle of popular sovereignty, the very cornerstone of populism. Three elements are central here: an anti-elite discourse (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017) a rejection of institutional mediations—especially partisan and parliamentary—between the people and the leader (Rosanvallon, 2021); and a preference for swift, unmediated decision-making, free from deliberation or contradiction (Hermet, 2008). Put differently, populism rests, as Nadia Urbinati (2019b) notes, on the oxymoronic idea of a “direct representation” of the people.

Yet preserving electoral procedures places populist leaders in front of a profound tension: they must maintain the appearance of democratic competition while securing unequivocal electoral victories that confirm popular endorsement of their personal authority. Consequently, much of the literature on populism has examined the inclusive dimension (Kapiszewski et al., 2021), particularly its ability to become a dominant political force if it succeeds in “constructing a people”—that is, in aggregating different social groups by building a “chain of equivalence” (Laclau, 2005: 73–74) against shared enemies and converting them into an electoral base.¹ Scholars have emphasized that populism is a “thin-centered ideology,” highly adaptable to different contexts (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017). This focus on its inclusive potential, however, often leaves a crucial question unaddressed: what happens to populism in power when it fails to mobilize the electorate on a large scale? Put differently, what are the consequences when mass abstention undermines the electoral legitimacy of the regime, as in Tunisia’s legislative (winter 2022–2023) and local assemblies (winter 2023–2024) elections, where turnout reached only 11%–12%?

When leaders such as Kais Saied repeatedly invoke popular sovereignty to justify their authority, while simultaneously reshaping electoral rules as well as media and judicial frameworks, are they not already moving along the path of electoral authoritarianism, in the sense described by Levitsky and Loxton (2013) in Latin America? Embodied in the election of a personalist outsider who mobilizes voters through an anti-establishment appeal, populism is a major catalyst for the emergence of competitive authoritarianism. Lacking experience with representative democratic institutions, holding an electoral mandate to dismantle the existing elite, and facing horizontal accountability institutions controlled by that elite, populists are driven to launch plebiscitary attacks against these institutions. When successful, fragile democracies almost invariably slide into competitive authoritarianism. And insofar as this form of populist rule recognizes only legitimacy derived from popular sovereignty—while rejecting the mediations and counterweights that traditionally underpin liberal democracy, whether political (parties), judicial (courts), or societal (media, associations) (Dahl, 1989; Sartori, 1987)—should it not be understood instead as a new form of illiberalism (Rosanvallon, 2021) or competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky and Way, 2012)?

Unpolitics as a populist style of power

The first key concept mobilized here is unpolitics, defined as a mode of relating to politics that is characteristic of populism. It connects the discourse of populist leaders—who denounce partitocracy and corrupt elites—with the behavior of citizens who prefer withdrawal from political life rather than mobilization and participation. Developed by Taggart (2019), this concept helps explain the phenomenon of “populism without the people,” or weakly mobilizing populism. So far, it has been applied almost exclusively to European cases (Ripoll Servent and Zaun, 2024; Robinson, 2023), even though it offers strong explanatory potential for the study of electoral authoritarian regimes.

The absence of such applications is likely due to Taggart’s claim that populism should not be analyzed in authoritarian settings (Taggart, 2019). However, in an earlier article, he argued that populism can emerge and develop in authoritarian contexts (Taggart, 2002), and even warned that, in its most extreme forms, it may “spill over into authoritarianism and move away from democracy altogether.”

In our view, Taggart’s definition of unpolitics rests on a narrow understanding of antipolitics that underestimates its centrality to populism. As already suggested in his 2002 article, the roots of antipolitical sentiment lie in populism’s rejection of pluralism (Taggart, 2002). At the same time, it is important not to conflate populism with antipolitics. As Kajsiu (2024) argues, antipolitics encompasses a much broader ideological diversity than populism and can emerge from different ideological traditions, not only from populist ones. He therefore distinguishes between two versions of antipolitics: one that rejects politics as an activity in itself, and another that criticizes the way politics is practiced. Recognizing this ideological diversity is essential to avoid oversimplification. In short, there are multiple antipolitical discourses, which may be socialist, liberal, conservative, and, of course, populist.

Although antipolitics is a polysemic notion (Beveridge and Featherstone, 2021; Tobiasz, 2023), it cannot be reduced to a purely “revolutionary” rejection of representative democracy. Nor can populism be confined to liberal or electoral democracies, even if it is particularly associated with them. Like antipolitics, unpolitics is based on a deeply negative view of politics as morally corrupting, a perception reinforced by recurrent scandals in Western democracies and by the conduct of some Tunisian parliamentarians during the 2014–2019 democratic legislature (Gobe, 2021).

Taggart further distinguishes unpolitics from apoliticism. While both involve withdrawal from partisan and electoral participation, apoliticism is usually associated with indifference or political incompetence, whereas unpolitics reflects a moral rejection of political engagement. Citizens abstain because they refuse to be drawn into collusive interests, opportunistic alliances, broken promises, and corruption—phenomena that populists portray as inherent to partitocracy. As a result, citizens avoid routine political participation but remain willing to mobilize episodically to endorse the popular legitimacy of their leader.

Finally, we argue that populism has also expanded within authoritarian regimes that rely on plebiscitary elections, as illustrated by Kais Saied’s presidency since 2021. The concept of unpolitics is therefore particularly useful for analyzing his trajectory from a populist project of “democracy from below” to a form of contemporary “Caesarism” (Desrues and Gobe, 2025). In such contexts, elections do not disappear but function as key instruments of legitimation. The leader derives authority from universal suffrage and periodically submits to it, not through genuine competition, but through plebiscitary ratification of the supposed unity between leader and people (Levitsky and Way, 2012).

This negative view of politics inherent in unpolitics is further consolidated in a second dimension concerning the recurrence of discursive practices employed by populists to reject the conflictual politics of partisan elites. These practices rely on metaphorical framings which, according to Taggart (2019), fall into three main registers: war, religion, and conspiracy. The war metaphor recalls the Schmittian friend–enemy distinction and the “extreme affective polarization” (McCoy et al., 2018) that follows from it. Warlike language legitimizes drastic measures, including reforms or the suspension of rights and freedoms, as if the state were engaged in a war with an external enemy. Elections are presented as battles in a war that must continue in both victory and defeat by following the populist leader’s line.

The second register is religious. Charismatic leadership, highly personalized and marked by divine grace, presents itself as external to the political establishment, a messiah sent by God to the virtuous people to show them the path of redemption (Canovan, 2005). Beyond charisma, Taggart (2019) also highlights the missionary vision embodied in the collective efforts of local populations to pursue development or improve living conditions.

The third and final register is conspiratorial. Populist discourses often frame politics as the work of “a small ill-intentioned clique” (Pirro and Taggart, 2022) responsible for all of the country’s, or even the world’s, problems—a powerful marker of unpolitics in populism.

In short, Taggart’s unpolitics sees populism as arising from occasional popular mobilization to reject the politics inherent in representative liberal–pluralist democracy, combined with the wish to return to private life by voting for an outsider who promises to dismantle the regime and establish people’s power. Populist discourse thus provides a compelling narrative through its use of warlike metaphors and friend–enemy polarization, messianic religious references, and conspiracy theories. This approach to unpolitics shows that populism is not a coherent ideology but a mode of enunciation of power: a leader who speaks in the name of the entire people, an organic conception of the social body, a moral vision of sovereignty, and a polarizing affective rhetoric often marked by religious, martial, or conspiratorial motifs. Consequently, unpolitics advances a fundamentally negative view of politics but people are willing to mobilize episodically to ratify the transfer of their destiny into the hands of the one who presents himself as their embodiment.

Domestic lawfare legitimated by unpolitics

In line with Pinos and Hau (2023), who have made a substantial and convincing effort to refine the concept of lawfare by proposing a new conceptualization around four main dimensions—geopolitical lawfare, domestic lawfare, state lawfare, and asymmetric lawfare,² we consider the notion of domestic lawfare the second main concept to be very useful for a heuristic approach to understanding Saied’s plebiscitary strategy and the consequences of unpolitics that legitimized it. It refers to the strategic use of law—particularly its procedures, deadlines, and formal requirements—the politicization of judges, or legal reforms employed as instruments to select and exclude political opponents (Pinos and Hau, 2023). Indeed, in the context of authoritarian populism losing its ability to mobilize popular support, domestic lawfare becomes a means of neutralizing the uncertainty inherent in electoral competition. Instead of relying on brutal repression or outright prohibition, this form of control operates through mechanisms that appear legal but are applied selectively and unequally, often bypassing or weakening judicial checks and balances. Such internal legal warfare undermines judicial independence and, in the most severe cases, results in the imprisonment of opposition figures. By neutralizing opponents through judicial, regulatory, or administrative channels while maintaining a façade of legality, it severely threatens democracy and strengthens authoritarianism, simulating the rule of law while subverting its foundations (Arato and Cohen, 2022). In this sense, discriminatory legalism is a central instrument of authoritarian unpolitics because it shifts political conflicts to the judicial arena, disqualifies dissenters in the name of law, and eliminates the possibility of pluralistic public deliberation.

From our perspective, the joint analysis of unpolitics and domestic lawfare helps explain how the former legitimizes the latter, and clarifies the specific features of Tunisian authoritarian populism. Kais Saied’s governance rests not only on coercion but also on a subtler strategy of deactivating politics, combining legal procedures with plebiscitary symbolism and polarized affective discourses framing that is characteristic of friend–enemy rhetoric.

Depoliticizing the 6 October 2024 presidential election: the weapon of domestic lawfare

On 1 July 2024, the President of the Tunisian Republic announced the date of the first round of the presidential election—pointedly omitting any reference to a potential second round. The announcement triggered a wave of candidacy declarations and calls for compliance with electoral law. This dynamic ran counter to the regime’s strategy, which viewed the election not as a democratic contest but as a plebiscite to reaffirm the legitimacy of the political order established after the coup of 25 July 2021. In response, the authorities rapidly introduced five measures: tightening eligibility criteria for candidates; initiating judicial proceedings against declared candidates, including imprisonment; disregarding administrative court rulings on electoral disputes; and passing legislation through the Assembly of the Representatives of the People (ARP) to strip the administrative judiciary of jurisdiction in favor of ordinary courts. Taken together, these measures amount to a strategy of domestic lawfare.

Restrictive candidacy conditions

Shortly after the decree convening voters was issued, the Independent High Authority for Elections (ISIE) published on its website a list of additional requirements compared to the 2019 presidential election. Candidates now had to provide proof of Tunisian nationality for their father, mother, paternal grandfather, and maternal grandfather; a copy of their criminal record (in Tunisia the so-called bulletin no. 3); and the sponsorship documents collected by the candidate. Regarding the latter, the ISIE imposed conditions that were difficult for many candidates to meet. Opposition figures could scarcely hope to secure the support of 10 deputies from the ARP or the National Council of Regions and Districts, or 40 elected local and regional council presidents. Their only alternative was to collect 10,000 signatures from registered voters spread across at least 10 constituencies, with no fewer than 500 per district—an almost impossible task within less than 3 months. The requirement to submit a criminal record extract provided another tool of exclusion, as the Ministry of Interior could simply refuse to issue the necessary bulletin. The inability to secure this document, insufficient sponsorships, or the ISIE’s rejection of signatures on technical grounds were the main reasons why 14 of the 17 aspiring candidates were barred from running (Human Rights Watch 2024).

Instrumentalizing the judiciary

Other candidates were eliminated even earlier, well before the official election announcement. The judiciary played a central role in sidelining several figures who had expressed their intention to run. Rached Ghannouchi—the head of the Islamist party Ennahda and president of the ARP—and another member of the Parliament, Abir Moussi—a staunch nostalgist of the Ben Ali era—were imprisoned as early as 2023, when Saied’s crackdown on parties opposing his project led to waves of arrests of nationally prominent political leaders. Yet it was not only party elites who were targeted. Trade unionists, civil society activists, and journalists were increasingly pressured, notably through systematic use of Article 24 of Decree-Law No. 54 of 13 September 2022, which criminalizes freedom of expression by sanctioning those who spread “rumors,” “false news,” or “falsified documents attributed to others with the intent of harming rights, undermining public security or national defense, or sowing terror among the population” (DCAF 2022).

Lotfi Meraihi, a 2019 presidential candidate who announced his candidacy on 2 April 2024 was arrested in early July on charges of money laundering and smuggling. On 12 July, Abdelatif Mekki, a former Ennahda leader and Minister of Health, was banned by a court from appearing on social media, speaking to the press, or leaving his local district, on the grounds of alleged involvement in a businessman’s death. Five other declared candidates were convicted after the election date was set. Ayachi Zammel, an industrialist and leader of a small liberal party, was initially cleared to run but was arrested on 2 September, released 3 days later, and immediately detained again.

Despite these moves, several candidates whose files had been rejected by the ISIE appealed to the administrative court. Initially, the court sided with the ISIE. But on appeal, in plenary session, it ruled in favor of three candidates—Mondher Zenaidi (a former Ben Ali minister exiled in France), Abdelatif Mekki, and Imed Daimi (vice-president of Hizb el-Harak, linked to former president Moncef Marzouki)—and ordered their inclusion on the final list of candidates admitted to stand (Ben Hamadi, 2024). But the ISIE refused to comply with the decision of the administrative court, whose judges were accused by Kais Saied’s supporters of being partial. These accusations were relayed by certain media outlets and social media accounts run by regime supporters (Business News, 2024). Abdelatif Mekki again referred the matter to the administrative court, requesting the reasoning behind its decision. The plenary assembly subsequently explained its judgment, thereby opening the way to a possible appeal for annulment of the presidential election by the three candidates excluded by the ISIE.

Stripping the administrative court of jurisdiction

To forestall the possibility of an appeal demanding the annulment of the presidential election—an unthinkable outcome for the presidency—a group of 34 deputies submitted a last-minute amendment on September 20—barely 2 weeks before the “first round.” The proposal transferred jurisdiction over presidential election disputes from the administrative to the ordinary judiciary, before the Tunis Court of Appeal at first instance, and subsequently before the Court of Cassation, whose judges have been fully dependent on the Ministry of Justice since the dissolution of the High Council of the Judiciary established by the 2014 constitution. The reform also sidelined the Court of Accounts, ostensibly to “ensure a unified judicial framework for electoral disputes” (Legal Agenda, 2024a). By removing its supervisory authority over election financing and transferring it to the Tunis Court of Appeal, the reform excluded both the administrative and financial judiciaries—bodies structurally more capable of asserting independence from the executive than the ordinary judiciary which is subordinate to the political power (Legal Agenda, 2024b). The amendment, adopted on 27 September, effectively sealed the process. By eliminating the two potentially independent jurisdictions, it ensured that no judicial body would risk annulling the election (Jeune Afrique, 2024). With all credible challengers sidelined, only Ayachi Zammel—from his prison cell—and Zouhaier Maghzaoui, a pan-Arab nationalist who had supported the 25 July 2021 coup, were left to face Saied in the October 6 election. Under such conditions, the election became the very illustration of electoral authoritarianism, aiming to turn the presidential election into a plebiscite on the incumbent president.

The unpolitical behavior of the “Man-People”: from rejecting “Partitocracy” to the presidential plebiscite

Kais Saied presents himself as the embodiment of the “man-people,” a leader positioned in radical opposition to political parties and interest groups (Rosanvallon, 2021). His relationship to the “people” rests not on representation as delegation but on representation as incarnation —where representing means “acting as” rather than “acting on behalf of,” implying “the juridical-political embodiment of a multiplicity in a single body, rather than a transfer of juridical authority” (Sintomer, 2016). As the incarnation of sovereign will, he is the mouth through which the people speak, or, to borrow the expression of the Indian populist leader, Narendra Modi, he is merely the “medium” through which “the voice of the people resonates” (Müller, 2022:81). He never declares “I want,” but always “the people want.” This pars pro toto conception of populism, in which the leader stands for the whole people and in which depoliticization entails marginalizing or destroying parties, leads to a modern form of Caesarism (Desrues and Gobe, 2025).

Although he champions the “inversion of the pyramid of power,” Saied concentrates all the attributes of an executive presidency into his hands. In this sense, he evokes the virtuous princes described in the medieval “mirrors for princes” writings, where politics was framed through the moral qualities of the ruler (Abbès, 2009). His supporters insist that his virtue uniquely qualifies him to govern, serving as the surest guarantee against arbitrariness (Elleuch, 2021).

The man-people, or virtue as the foundation of power

Because his intentions are presented as pure—devoted exclusively to the people—Saied claims the status of supreme interpreter of the law. In this respect, he resembles the “just despot” envisioned by the Egyptian reformist Mohamed Abdou (1849–1905), who argued that the Muslim Orient needed a ruler who would, under the sway of fear if necessary, compel his people to pursue their collective interests—living for them more than for himself (Abdou, 1970).

In the modern Western tradition, representation as incarnation has been theorized by critics of parliamentarism and parties, most famously Carl Schmitt. Under the Weimar Republic (1919–1933), Nazi jurist Schmitt (2013a) argued that parliament should function merely as an assembly of elected delegates, whereas the president—elected directly by the people—embodied the confidence of the entire nation, transcending the narrow confines of partisan organizations and bureaucracies.

In this notion of incarnation, the populist critique of parliamentarism finds an alternative grounded in an organic conception of the people as a unified body, impatient with partisan squabbles and inclined to support strong leadership (Canovan, 1999). Saied was elected on precisely such a program, promising to dismantle “partitocracy” and sweep away “corrupt elites.”

His refusal to transform his electoral support into a political party placed him, from his election in 2019 onward, in direct personal confrontation with the main parliamentary parties, notably the Islamo-conservative Ennahda. The polarization among the three main political institutions established by the 2014 constitution—the presidency, the government, and parliament—combined with the demagogic drift of some parties, the impunity surrounding corruption, and the gap between parliamentary democracy and popular expectations, generated the conditions for a regime crisis (Gobe, 2022a). Drawing on a popularity rooted largely in the moral dimension of his persona, Saied staged his coup d’état on 25 July 2021. He relied on a strategy of extreme affective polarization, casting politics as a Schmittian friend–enemy struggle: “them,” the corrupt partisan elites who had brought Tunisia to catastrophe, against “us,” that is “the people,” united with their president to save the country and open a new historical era.

The coup of 25 July 2021 inaugurated the autocratic and Caesarist phase of Saied’s presidency (Camau, 2023; Redissi, 2022; Tamburini, 2023). The presidential election of 6 October 2024—conceived by Saied in similarly unanimous and Schmittian terms—represented the final stage in institutionalizing an authoritarian presidential regime, following the adoption of a presidential constitution through a plebiscitary referendum on 25 July 2022. In this regard, the Constitution makes the President of the Republic the sole holder of executive power. Assisted by a head of government who is accountable to him, the President appoints and dismisses ministers as he sees fit. In addition to his powers regarding appointments to senior civil and military positions, the President also has significant legislative powers (Gobe, 2022b). For example, he can pass decree-laws during parliamentary recesses and obtain authorization from the Assembly of People’s Representatives to govern by decree-law for a limited period (Article 70). Most notably, he can propose legislative referendums relating to the organization of public powers directly, thus bypassing Parliament (Article 97). Kais Saied’s text establishes a president with absolute power, free from any political or criminal accountability. Furthermore, he has broad powers enabling him to override the provisions of the Constitution and extend his power as head of state (Gobe, 2022b). Article 90 provides that the President of the Republic is elected “for a period of five years by direct, free and secret universal suffrage” and specifies that “if elections cannot take place in a timely manner because of war or imminent danger, the presidential term shall be extended by law until the reasons for its extension cease to exist.” In other words, by invoking the malleable concept of “imminent danger,” the President can extend his term of office indefinitely. Furthermore, on the grounds of “imminent danger,” the President can proclaim a state of emergency (Article 96) and extend it at will, as no one other than the President can terminate it. In short, Kais Saied can establish a “sovereign dictatorship” (Schmitt, 2013b) that is beyond the law and not subject to time limits (Gobe, 2022a).

A president present in the pre-campaign, absent in the official campaign

True to his rejection of electoral competition—seen as the expression of social division into interest groups at odds with his vision of unity and organic society—Saied declined to campaign during the official electoral period. This absence, signaling institutional fragility, reflects his populist hostility toward political mediation, which prevented him from creating a party or movement capable of mobilizing voters or citizens in structured political projects.

As a result, Saied lacked organized local networks to conduct a nationwide campaign or persuade citizens to vote for him. Then he limited himself to publishing a manifesto and delivering a speech on the eve of the ballot, carefully avoiding any assessment of his 5-year record. During the electoral campaign, he never appeared in person before the voters.

Instead, his family members—most notably his younger brother, lawyer Naoufel Saied, and his sister-in-law Atika Chebil—conducted a conventional but lackluster campaign, organizing small groups to visit markets and public squares, distributing leaflets, and displaying posters of their candidate (Dahmani, 2024). Their slogan, “one round, not two . . . from Bizerte to Tataouine” (from North to South), merely expressed the president’s will to transform the election into a plebiscite.

While Saied avoided direct campaigning in September, before the launch of the official period of the electoral campaign, he multiplied official visits across the country in July, staged and broadcast through the presidency’s Facebook page (Ben Hedi, 2024). These appearances allowed him to claim that the crises afflicting Tunisia—especially the repeated summer water shortages—were the work of internal enemies seeking to sabotage the election (Abdelmoula, 2024b). To reinforce the plebiscitary dimension, he adopted a particularly belligerent tone toward his opponents at both the launch and conclusion of the campaign.

Kaïs Saied’s electoral campaign—or rather his non-campaign—illustrates with particular clarity the constitutive tension at the heart of populist unpolitics. Elections appear indispensable as a means of expressing popular sovereignty, yet they are conceived as mechanisms for revealing the will of the people rather than as arenas of competition. This understanding corresponds to what Max Weber described as plebiscitary domination, in which the leader derives legitimacy not from intermediary organizations but from the personal bond he maintains with his supporters, a bond periodically reactivated through elections and public appearances.

The discursive dimension of unpolitics: war, religion, and conspiracy

Saied’s two public interventions during the campaign concentrated the discursive elements that characterize the unpolitical dimension of populism. Their content activated the three metaphorical frames identified by Taggart (2019) as constitutive of populist discourse: war, religion, and conspiracy. These registers dovetail neatly with Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction, which Saied mobilized to reinforce the plebiscitary logic of the election. To grasp the unpolitics of Saied’s populism, it is thus necessary to analyze how these three dimensions interact. His official interventions took two forms: a profession of faith published shortly after the campaign opened, and a speech circulated in video form, set against the backdrop of the scales of justice and widely disseminated on pro-presidential Facebook pages.

A language of war against the enemies of the people

In both texts, Saied consistently portrayed his opponents as enemies of the people intent on plunging the country into chaos and civil war in order to divide it. The people, by contrast, were cast as heroic actors engaged with Saied in a merciless struggle: “Together we have waged a long war of attrition against the forces of reaction and the mercenaries within, themselves in symbiosis with foreign circles.”³ In insurrectionary tones, he declared: “Our people will never lay down their arms. Arms are not only rifles or bullets fired in bursts, but also the firm conviction that there will be no turning back.”⁴ This rhetoric dramatized the stakes of the election, framing it as a moment of historic rupture—an irreversible victory of the people over their internal enemies.

Saied’s expected victory was meant to confirm that Tunisia had entered, from 25 July 2021, a “new era” long desired by its citizens, as he said: “It was necessary to take the historic decision to save the Tunisian state, to respond to the demand for a dignified life [. . .] and to engage hand in hand in the national battle on a path of no return.”⁵

The Messianism of the leader: between religiosity and millenarianism

For Saied, the presidential election represented a “crossing” (‘ubûr in Arabic), likened to the Egyptian army’s crossing of the Suez Canal on 6 October 1973, during the Arab-Israeli war, but also evoking the biblical crossing of the Red Sea—a messianic passage of a people toward deliverance. The reference carried powerful resonance in Arab collective memory. Within this millenarian vision, Tunisia was poised to enter a decisive stage on the road to the complete realization of popular power, with Saied himself as the divine instrument of this mission:

The great crossing will take place, God willing. The voices of the voters will emerge and make the ballot boxes tremble, just as the voices of the Tunisian people made the earth tremble on 17 December 2010, then on 25 July 2021. The time has come to cross everywhere, O members of our glorious people.

These two dates symbolize the founding events of the new era Saied promises: the sacrificial immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi that triggered the revolution, and the president’s coup against representative institutions to reclaim the revolutionary path of 2010–2011. Reproducing his apocalyptic and eschatological schema, Saied concluded that, as at the end of time, the wicked would be punished, for this crossing must culminate in “complete liberation, total purification, and the completion of the revolution”—opening the way for the people to rally around his second campaign slogan: “to build and to edify.”

This religious register—blending Islamic references, Arab memory, and end-times imagery—reinforced Saied’s prophetic posture as a “prophet-leader” (Zúquete, 2017) destined to guide the people toward collective redemption.

Conspiracy as justification for populist authoritarianism

Both campaign texts bristle with conspiracist language, depicting opponents as “immoral and corrupt” actors in the pay of foreign interests. They are denounced as “debris” who have infiltrated state institutions, paralyzing their normal functioning. Tunisia’s economic and social hardships since the July 2021 self-coup are framed as the outcome of this conspiracy: hiding foodstuffs, provoking medicine shortages, engaging in speculation and monopolies, fomenting unrest, and spreading “all kinds of slander and lies” (Zúquete, 2017).

Conspiracism occupies a central place in Saied’s rhetoric, justifying both the exclusion of rivals and the regime’s failures in mobilizing voters. Obstacles of every kind are blamed on a vast domestic and international plot: corrupt parties, Zionist spies, or agents of the old regime. Shortly after his re-election, at the swearing-in ceremony, Saied returned to this register, denouncing a “criminal consensus” aimed at sabotaging the election, fragmenting the country into “fiefs,” and restoring servitude. He thanked God and the people for foiling this plot, declaring that “there is no place for traitors, mercenaries, and those who have thrown themselves into the arms of the colonizer.” He insisted that Tunisia now needed a “cultural revolution” to complete the regime’s moral edifice.

In this discourse, conspiracism becomes the language of unpolitics, delegitimizing all opposition by essentializing it as malicious, treacherous, and foreign, while replacing legitimate democratic conflict with a moral war for the survival of a purified political body.

An electoral victory without a plebiscite: the partial failure of the authoritarian scenario

Saied’s dual strategy—judicially eliminating challengers while staging a plebiscitary campaign infused with the rhetoric of unpolitics—secured his re-election on 6 October 2024, with 90.69% of the vote (2,438,054 ballots). His two opponents, Ayachi Zammel (running from prison) and Zouhaier Maghzaoui (a pan-Arab nationalist once aligned with the regime), garnered 7.35% and 1.97%, respectively. On the surface, the victory appeared overwhelming. Yet it was undermined by extremely low turnout.

Participation reached only 28.8%, far below the symbolic threshold of democratic legitimation. Even more strikingly, only 6% of voters aged 18–35 went to the polls—evidence of the deep disengagement of a generation that, only five years earlier, had mobilized around hopes of political renewal. At the same time, turnout was still higher than in the legislative and local elections since July 2021, which hovered at 11%–12%. With nearly 2.5 million votes, Saied’s support was comparable to that of the 2022 constitutional referendum (2,607,884 “yes” votes) and slightly below his 2019 tally (2,777,931). His electoral base has therefore not expanded; if anything, it has eroded slightly, even as he retains notable popular support.

This paradox—a massive victory resting on minority legitimacy—captures the central tension of the authoritarian plebiscite: its success requires mass mobilization, which in practice can only be engineered by eliminating political alternatives. Saied was confirmed by “the mass of voters,” but not by “the people as a whole.”

These dynamics confirm the relevance of Taggart’s unpolitics thesis (Taggart, 2019, 2024). As Mohamed Rami Abdelmoula (2024a) observes, Saied’s supporters are “without name or address: they are neither organized nor united by the same premises and aspirations, nor by the same promises and projects.” They form neither a party, nor a movement, nor even a community of ideas. They are bound not by a project but by a rejection—of the discredited partisan system—and a belief—in the virtue of one man. Unpolitics here functions less as an ideology than as a survival strategy.

In this respect, Kais Saied’s populism differs from the left-wing populisms of Latin America in the 2000s. Leaders such as Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia were able to mobilize voters across successive electoral cycles by relying on organizations designed to structure and promote popular participation, which did not always take the form of political parties. For instance, anti-party sentiment in Chávez’s Venezuela did not prevent him from establishing various organizations and institutions (Bolivarian Circles, Communal Councils, etc.) which, sustained by the financial flows of oil rent, fostered the adherence of popular sectors to his leadership (de la Torre, 2023).

As for Evo Morales, whose leadership rested on a vast network of indigenous peasant workers’ organizations, he was brought to power by the MAS, a political party nourished by powerful social movements. He was thus able to rely on a range of organizations and collectives that campaigned in his support when he put his mandate to the test in 2008 through a recall referendum. While his political experiment points to forms of “participatory populism” (Tarragoni, 2019), it subsequently underwent a process of autocratization, with Evo Morales running in the 2019 presidential election despite having lost, in 2016, a constitutional referendum that would have authorized him to seek a fourth term. From this perspective, Hugo Chávez was no exception, having abolished presidential term limits in 2009, thereby setting Venezuela on an increasingly authoritarian trajectory.

Aware of his failure to mobilize, Saied portrayed his re-election—achieved without genuine choice—as a victory robbed of its plebiscitary dimension by the “enemies of the people.” Rather than calming the political climate, his triumph reignited the slogans of unpolitics. In his swearing-in speech, he again drew on Schmittian affective polarization, reinterpreting Tunisia’s post-2011 history through the lens of conspiracy.⁶ He denounced attempts to “abort the revolution” by those who remained “behind the curtain to torment the people.”⁷ Since the “revolutionary explosion” of 17 December 2010, he claimed, conspiracies had continuously sought to divide the country. Even the presidential election, he argued, had nearly been derailed by traitors and spies, thwarted only through divine grace and the vigilance of the people:

There was a criminal consensus to plunge the country into a conflict of legality and fratricidal struggles in order to divide and dismember it into multiple fiefs. But thanks to God, deputies foiled the plans of Freemasons and Zionist spies at the global level.⁸

According to Saied, the Tunisian people remain ready, from “crossing to crossing,” to wage a “national war of liberation to rid the country of all debris, venomous reptiles, and snakes.” He thus reproduced the classic “conspiracist bestiary” of what “crawls and infiltrates” and what is “undulating and slimy” (Girardet, 1986). In the new Tunisia under construction, he declared, “there is no place for traitors, mercenaries, and those who have thrown themselves into the arms of the colonizer,” for the country requires “a new cultural revolution.”

Conclusion

The 6 October 2024 presidential election that closed Saied’s first term offered less a pluralist contest than a symbolic act of allegiance—a plebiscite designed to consolidate his political dominance. Since 2019, Saied has cultivated a distinctive populist persona, dedicated to dismantling representative democracy and the party system. As the self-styled “Man-People,” he has cast himself as a providential figure guided by both the people and God, and defined himself against their supposed enemies: political parties and conspirators accused of betraying the revolution of 17 December 2010, as opposed to the “treason” of 14 January 2011, when Ben Ali fled and Tunisia’s democratic transition began.

Building on the coup of 25 July 2021, institutions—security, judicial, electoral, and representative—were subordinated to the new regime and mobilized to exclude Saied’s most credible rivals, through selective and discretionary uses of law amounting to discriminatory legalism or lawfare. This exclusion was legitimated in public discourse by extreme affective polarization, staged in Schmittian terms of friend versus enemy. By systematically deploying the frames of war, religion, and conspiracy, Saied constructed a form of populist legitimacy grounded outside of institutional channels.

This top-down authoritarian populism found some resonance from below, but without generating mass mobilization. Low turnout raises doubts about the regime’s capacity to sustain durable legitimacy. While many citizens may still prefer Saied’s Caesarism to a return to discredited partisan democracy, this rejection of representative institutions remains insufficiently explored. It calls for empirical research into the social, cultural, and symbolic dynamics of unpolitics, and their role in fostering support for authoritarian populist rule in Tunisia.

The Tunisian case thus highlights the analytical value of unpolitics as a concept for understanding contemporary authoritarian populism. First, its role as a discursive framing that legitimizes the neutralization of opposition through law or other means should be examined in comparative perspective. Second, the notion foregrounds the inherent tension in populism between, on the one hand, the desire to maintain electoral rituals that convey an appearance of democratic legitimacy and, on the other hand, the ambition to establish an unmediated, plebiscitary order—an ambition ultimately undermined by the logic of political demobilization of the population.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Megan Watkins for reviewing the English text.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Generative artificial intelligence (ai)

This article was written by both authors. The English version was drafted with the help of Artificial Intelligence (Chatgpt 4) and reviewed by Megan Watkins, translator from Spanish to English.

Ethics

There are no human participants in this article and informed consent is not required.

ORCID iDs

Thierry Desrues

Éric Gobe

Notes

Author biographies

Thierry Desrues is a senior researcher at the IESA-CSIC. He studies authoritarian political regimes with elections, opposition forces and political dissent, protest movements and associative participation, with a special interest in the hybrid political-institutional frameworks, youth movilizations and the North African region.

Éric Gobe is a research director at the CNRS. As a political scientist, he was editor-in-chief of L’Année du Maghreb (2004–2012). His current work focuses on populism and authoritarianism in Tunisia. He also works on the sociology of the legal professions and the socio-political issues of transitional justice in the Maghreb.

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