Do we like Kais Saied?
Our score: 2 out of 10. A pattern of harmful words and acts aimed at migrants, LGBTQ+ people and women, with only a thin slice of good alongside.
Saied is a constitutional law professor from Tunis, born in 1958. He had no party behind him when he ran for president in 2019 as an independent. In 2021 he dismissed the government and dissolved parliament, and he has ruled by decree since. His opponents call that a coup. He says he is just enforcing the law.
The big stoush is what has happened to his critics since. In February 2026 an appeal court raised jail terms in the mass "conspiracy" trial of opposition figures, and Ennahda leader Rached Ghannouchi's sentence went up to 20 years. The accused deny the charges and say the case was fabricated for political reasons. Saied says his actions are legal and meant to end chaos and corruption.
On the harm test he has a long record in his own words. In February 2023 he called for urgent measures against sub-Saharan migrants and accused them, without evidence, of plotting to change Tunisia's demographics. Rights groups then reported a spike in vigilante violence against Black Africans, and the African Union said it was deeply shocked. His government's foreign minister later said it had been misread.
On LGBTQ+ people, a 2019 profile lists among his controversial positions the claim that public expression of homosexuality is funded by foreign parties. Under the anti-homosexuality law, rights groups reported more than 80 arrests between September 2024 and January 2025, though the article quotes no statement from Saied himself on it. On women, he called the inheritance-equality debate "false and misguided" in 2020. Human Rights Watch says he has blocked efforts to improve women's inheritance access.
The Saidani case shows how it works in practice. The MP had once backed Saied's takeover, then mocked him with a post calling him the "supreme commander of sewage and rainwater drainage". Police arrested him, and a court sentenced him to eight months for harming others via social media. Rights groups say dozens of Saied's critics are being prosecuted or jailed, including under a false news law.
The good stuff is thin. Saied pardoned more than a thousand people for Eid al-Adha in 2026, and that included Saidani. But a pardon for a man jailed for mocking you doesn't undo the jailing. His defenders say he is cleaning up a corrupt political class, and that is the line he gives himself. The reporting I read doesn't show kindness to the people he's targeted.