Voting began in Tunisia’s presidential election on Sunday, with no real opposition to the incumbent, Kais Saied, who is widely tipped to win as his most prominent critics remain behind bars.

Three years after Saied staged a sweeping power grab, the election is seen as the closing chapter in Tunisia’s experiment with democracy.

For more than a decade, the North African country had taken pride in being the birthplace of the Arab Spring uprisings against dictatorship.

Polling opened at 8:00 am (0700 GMT) and is set to close at 6:00 pm (1700 GMT).

The electoral board, ISIE, has said preliminary results should be available by Wednesday, though they may be known earlier.

At one polling station in central Tunis, AFP reporters observed a group of mostly older men lining up to vote.

Ahead of polling day, there were no campaign rallies or public debates, and nearly all the campaign posters in city streets featured Saied.

With little hope for change in a country mired in economic crisis, much of the electorate has displayed a mood of resignation.

“We have nothing to do with politics,” Mohamed, a 22-year-old who gave only his first name for fear of retribution, told AFP in the capital.

Neither he nor his friends planned to vote, as they believed it was “useless.”

After rising to power in a landslide in 2019, Saied, now 66, led a sweeping power grab that saw him rewrite the constitution.

A burgeoning crackdown on dissent followed, with a number of Saied’s critics across the political spectrum jailed, sparking criticism both at home and abroad.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has said that more than “170 people are detained in Tunisia on political grounds or for exercising their fundamental rights”.

Jailed opposition figures include Rached Ghannouchi, head of the Islamist-inspired opposition party Ennahdha, which dominated political life after the revolution.

Also detained is Abir Moussi, head of the Free Destourian Party, which critics accuse of wanting to bring back the regime ousted in 2011.

AFP