Tunisia is opening up to a new Constitution.
The text of Tunisian President Kais Saied was adopted overnight from Tuesday to Wednesday, after the victory of the "yes" at 94%, during a referendum marked by a very strong abstention.
As the main opposition parties boycotted Monday's poll, what was at stake was turnout, which stood at at least 27.54% of the 9.3 million registered voters, according to the electoral authority Isie.
By comparison, the last legislative elections in 2019 attracted 32% of voters.
After the announcement of estimates on Monday, which announced between 92 and 93% of “yes” in favor of the Constitution, hundreds of supporters of the president celebrated on Bourguiba Avenue in the heart of the capital, sounding their horns or brandishing the national flag.
“Kais, we are sacrificing for you,” some shouted while singing the national anthem.
Around 1 a.m. (local time), the president appeared in front of a cheering crowd.
"Tunisia has entered a new phase", he said, assuring that the turnout "would have been higher if the vote had taken place over two days".
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The voters were above all "the most aggrieved middle classes, adults who feel cheated economically, politically and socially", analyzed the director of Sigma Conseil.
Vast powers to the head of state
Tunisia, facing an economic crisis aggravated by the Covid and the war in Ukraine - on which it depends for its wheat imports - has been very polarized since Kais Saied, democratically elected in 2019, seized all the powers on 25 July 2021.
The controversial new fundamental law imposed by the president grants vast powers to the head of state, breaking with the parliamentary system in place since 2014. The president appoints the head of government and ministers and can dismiss them at will.
He can submit to Parliament legislative texts which have "priority".
A second chamber will represent the regions, as a counterweight to the current Assembly of Representatives (deputies).
The opposition and many NGOs have denounced a Constitution "tailor-made" for Kais Saied, and the risk of authoritarian drift of a president not accountable to anyone.
Sadok Belaïd, the lawyer commissioned by Mr. Saied to draw up the new Constitution, disavowed the final text, believing that it could “open the way to a dictatorial regime”.
Questions around a return to a dictatorial regime
President Saied, 64, exercises power in an increasingly solitary way.
He considers his overhaul of the Constitution as an extension of the "correction of course" initiated on July 25, 2021 when, citing political and economic blockages, he dismissed his Prime Minister and froze Parliament before dissolving it in March.
The new text "gives almost all the powers to the president and dismantles all the systems and institutions that can control him," Said Benarbia, regional director of the International Commission of Jurists ICJ, told AFP.
For analyst Youssef Cherif, spaces of freedom remain guaranteed but the question of a return to a dictatorial regime similar to that of the former autocrat of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, could arise "after Kais Saied ".
For most of the population, the priority is elsewhere: sluggish growth (around 3%), high unemployment (nearly 40% of young people), galloping inflation and the increase in the number of poor to 4 million people.
Tunisia, on the verge of default with a debt of more than 100% of GDP, is negotiating a new loan with the IMF which has a good chance of being granted but will require in return sacrifices likely to provoke social unrest.