Tunisia to vote, between low female representation and boycott of parties: women candidates were 48% in 2014, today only 15%

ROME – Just 15 percent of the candidates in these elections are women. In 2014 they accounted for 48 per cent of applications, while in 2019 they were 47.5 per cent. In recent years, the high participation of women was helped by an electoral law which provided for the alternation of men and women in the composition of lists. The law promulgated with a decree by President Saied in September, on the other hand, eliminated the alternation mechanism based on the principle that women can do it on their own, without the need for “women’s quotas”, because it is merit that counts.

The obstacles posed by the electoral law. The first limitation, and perhaps the biggest, is that the new law required that each candidate be supported by four hundred signatures of citizens registered in the electoral colleges. According to Torkia Chebbi, president of LET, an association founded in 2011 with the main objective of strengthening female participation in political life as a prerequisite for the full realization of democracy in Tunisia, this requirement was the most difficult to overcome. Reason why in today’s elections there will be female candidates in just about sixty constituencies. Furthermore, women have found it difficult to access public spaces to campaign, particularly in those that are frequented mainly by men, such as cafés.

Bars and family are great places for political discussions. A survey from 2019 and quoted by the online magazine Nawaat revealed that 41% of people in Tunisia consider bars as the main forum for political discussion. The family as a place of debate represents only 18 percent. Also according to the new electoral law, candidates no longer have access to public funding, so they have to rely on their own means or on the help of private individuals. But women have more difficulty accessing wealth. The unemployment rate among people with higher education – writes the online magazine Nawaat – is 17.6 percent for men and 40.7 percent among women, based on data for the third quarter of 2020. Added to this are wage inequalities. A study – also cited by Nawaat – explains how individual wealth is the main element in Tunisia that pushes women towards political life, therefore the elimination of public funding instead of relying on merit, as claimed by the President, has the consequence only that of cutting off a slice of the population from the possibility of accessing political functions.

The boycott of parties. The main Tunisian parties, from the republican to the workers’, have promised to boycott the elections. The same will be done by the president of the Tunisian Association of Democratic Women Nadia Zoghlami, who has underlined on several occasions that the parliament that will come out of today’s elections will be markedly conservative, regardless of gender representation. Because the problem – Zoghlami underlines in various interviews – goes far beyond the women’s question, however important it would have been to guarantee equality. It is the entire political system set up by President Kais Saied, who has never hidden his aversion to political parties, that is contested by the majority of society.

A fragmented Parliament will be born. According to Zoghlami, these elections are not based on programmes, which is why a weakened parliament will emerge, whose only function will be to legitimize Saied’s choices. “The electoral law is clearly directed against the parties”, explains the essayist Hatem Nafti in an interview with the newspaper liberation. And the ban on public funding serves precisely to prevent any affiliation. In this way the next Parliament will be fragmented, made up of isolated individuals and so it will be difficult to organize a parliamentary opposition that acts as a counter-power to Kais Saied. And this is exactly his political project.