Tunisian President Kais Saied calls for 'cultural revolution' in inauguration speech

The Tunisian leader has blamed foreign plots for the country's economic woes

Tunisia's President Kais Saied takes oath in Tunis following his re-election. AP

Tunisian President Kais Saied was inaugurated for a second term on Tuesday, after winning the election with more than 90 per cent of the vote.

About 27 per cent of eligible Tunisians, or 2.7 million, voted in the October 6 poll. Critics point to the disqualification or arrest of all but two of 12 candidates as a reason for Mr Saied's large share of the vote. One challenger, Ayachi Zammel, was jailed five days before the election, accused of falsifying endorsements.

The 66-year-old, dubbed “RoboCop” by his supporters for his promises to crack down on crime, said the country needed a “cultural revolution” to combat unemployment, fight terrorism and root out corruption.

“The aim is to build a country where everyone can live in dignity,” Mr Saied said in a speech addressing members of Tunisia's parliament.

According to a World Bank report last year, Tunisia has “one of the highest rates of unemployment in the Middle East”, officially at 16 per cent.

Mr Saied, formerly a lecturer in law, took office in 2019 amid a fractured political class, years of political deadlock and high unemployment, following the 2011 ouster of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

All but freezing the country’s nearly decade-long experiment with democracy, he suspended parliament in July 2021 amid national protests against poor services and economic deterioration. Since then, he has been accused of a succession of power grabs, arresting opposition figures and critics.

In his speech on Tuesday, he promised to target the “thieves and traitors on the payroll of foreigners” and blamed “counterrevolutionary forces” for obstructing his efforts to buoy Tunisia's struggling economy throughout his first term in office.

“The task was not easy. The dangers were great,” he said. “The arms of the old regime were like vipers circulating everywhere. We could hear them hissing, even if we couldn’t see them.”

Though Mr Saied proclaimed a commitment to respecting freedoms, many journalists were prevented from covering his swearing-in on Monday, leading to a rebuke from the National Syndicate of Tunisian Journalists, which expressed “its firm condemnation of the ongoing blackout policy and restrictions on journalistic work” in a news release on Monday.