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TUNIS – Soon after being elected president of Tunisia at the end of 2019, Qais Sayed walked into his usual cafe in the capital as if nothing had changed.
Farooq Chihawi, who serves hookah or tobacco pipes at the cafe, could not believe his eyes.
Here is the man who until recently taught university law courses, always parked outside in a battered Peugeot, paid his bills and “looked just like people”.
Only now—escorted by guards, greeted by a teeming crowd—he was their president. “I took a selfie like a friend would. Honestly, it was pretty special.
For Chihawi, the meeting cemented his belief — shared by many of the president’s supporters — that Sayed was one of them. He will vote yes on Monday in a controversial referendum on a new constitution that Sayed insists will lead Tunisia to a more prosperous future.
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Many other Tunisians believe the opposite will happen. They say Sayed has spent the past year in a prolonged power grab and that his proposed constitution – published just weeks ago – was created through an illegitimate process. They say the referendum will only further cement his one-man rule and undo the progress made since the country’s 2011 revolution that ousted dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and ushered in the Middle East’s Arab Spring.
With no minimum turnout required and many of Sayed’s opponents boycotting the process to avoid his confidence, the referendum is expected to pass.
The vote comes a year to the day since Syed dissolved parliament and fired his prime minister, abruptly dividing the country between those who celebrated his decision as necessary to end an ongoing political crisis and those who denounced it as a coup that threatened the survival of the only democracy to emerge from the Arab Spring.
The move – which came amid a deadly surge of coronavirus cases and a political impasse between the president and a divided parliament – was initially widely welcomed in Tunisia and thrust Sayed, a man who once seemed an unlikely candidate to wield such vast political power, into the spotlight.
His strained manner of speaking and insistence on using formal Arabic instead of the Tunisian dialect earned him the nickname “RoboCop”. Even some of his supporters, including Chihawi, admit that he lacks the typical charisma and sociability that so often accompany a successful political figure.
Still, he ran for president at a time when Tunisians — weary of a decade of failure to improve the economy and politicians who failed to deliver on their promises — welcomed his status as a relative outsider in the political system and a sense of his trustworthiness. He won 73 percent of the vote.
He became hugely popular last summer among those who saw his drastic measures to suspend parliament as necessary to remove corrupt or ineffective officials, including in the moderate Islamist Ennahda party, once a dominant force in the government.
But for some of those supporters, the popularity was short-lived. Now, the country, mired in a worsening economic crisis and facing widespread political division, is grappling with what many of his one-time supporters see as the fallout from their previous misapprehension.
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“He went right under everyone’s noses,” said Abderauf Betbayeb, a retired diplomat who knew Sayed for decades and was part of his inner circle before he left in 2020. “He threw the country into crisis.”
Lawyer and politician Samia Abu has never been enamored of Syed, but was among those who applauded his unconventional intervention last July, hoping it would mark a new beginning for the country’s democracy.
But in September, when Syed announced an extension of the state of emergency and a further expansion of his powers, she felt he had strayed too far from the script. Then, in December, he announced that parliament would remain suspended until the end of the referendum in July. Finally, in March, he declared parliament dissolved and has since replaced the members of the Independent Electoral Commission with his own appointees.
Now, she said, she feels certain that the new constitution is simply laying the foundations for a “dictatorship.”
“I can’t regret something that had to happen,” she said of her support for his initial decision last July. But what followed “was done in bad faith. It was not fair.
“He managed to divide the people in two. … We never experienced this, not even under Ben Ali’s regime,” she said, referring to the 2011 ousted dictator. “We have become fanatics, either for or against. People no longer smile together, even within a family.
Even Syed, the expert tasked with writing the new constitution, is among those now publicly condemning the president and boycotting Monday’s vote, saying it would be an ethical “betrayal” for him to take part.
Sadok Belaid, a former dean of the University of Tunis’ law school who taught Sayed as a young man, agreed this spring to lead the advisory committee responsible for drafting the new legal document. He had known Syed for decades, he said, describing him as “very kind, very nice, very humble.”
For weeks, Belaid recalls, he worked tirelessly on the project. The day after he submitted his finished version of the new constitution, he said, he entered the hospital for an operation he had postponed to write the document.
Later that day, in his hospital bed and still under the effects of anesthesia, he said, Syed visited him and handed him a stack of documents he described as a modified version of Belaid’s work.
It wasn’t until the president left that Belaid, who is 80, realized he was holding an entirely different version of the constitution — one that Syed appears to have largely written himself. The new version gives Syed additional powers and reduces the influence of parliament, among other changes widely condemned by his opponents.
“It’s a real comedy … that ends badly,” Bellaid said. “The reality is that the president is using this prestige that he has in the eyes of the population to adopt a text that does not meet the needs or demands of the people, but his own intentions.
Back at the cafe, Chihawi said that it was indeed Syed’s reputation as a “cultured” man that attracted him to his candidacy.
Still, in Tunisia, irritated by political strife, “I thought it was a dream.”
“A man of the people becomes president? It didn’t make too much sense,” he said. Now that Syed is in power, he said, he supports any decision the president may make. “Everything he does is for the people.
Just outside the cafe, Sami bin Mohammed, 42, a salesman, expressed a much less optimistic view. Smoking a cigarette, he bemoaned the worsening economic situation and said he would boycott Monday’s vote.
“Every president works for his own good,” he said. And in the poorer neighborhoods, he added, “everyone is planning to leave illegally. I don’t think it’s possible to fix things here.”
In the city center on Saturday, a small crowd gathered to protest the referendum and show support for the Ennahda party.
“We are here because Mr. Qais Sayed is carrying out a coup in Tunisia,” said 63-year-old Fathiya Azaiz. “He changes everything. … The president is self-isolating and not democratic.”
Nearby, Kautar Getiti, 36, a graphic designer, walked with his 6-year-old daughter, who was holding a small Tunisian flag. She will vote yes on Monday, she said, because she believes Syed intends to put the country on a more stable path for her daughter’s future.
“He has a legal education. He knows very well what he is doing. He will not be a dictator any more than others,” she said.
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