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.
Desrues et al. (Tue,) studied this question.