Tunisia
The electoral authority Isie announced on Monday, July 20, the preliminary results of the second round of the by-election in the El Kabaria constituency of Tunis: Chaker Bouthouri took the seat with 1,225 votes, or 50.14 percent, against 1,218 for Mohamed Salah Salmi: a margin of seven votes. Turnout was again very low; the Chahed observatory recorded about 1 percent by midday on Sunday with only a late-afternoon pickup, and the first round on June 28 had drawn roughly 4 percent according to Isie. The parliament elected under Kaïs Saïed's new constitution is thus filling its vacancies with a few hundred votes in a constituency of more than 60,000 registered voters, which says more about the institution's standing than about any candidate.
From July 8 to July 18, President Kaïs Saïed received no one at Carthage, chaired no publicised meeting and made no announced visit: at a time when the country was living through daily power cuts, water outages and a heatwave, with no presidential meeting on the crisis announced. Business News also notes that he sent Foreign Minister Mohamed Ali Nafti to convey Tunisia's condolences in Doha after the death of Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani on July 12, departing from his own precedent of travelling in person. The same newsroom's fact-check found that a clip circulating as a July 17 presidential response to the rumours is in fact from April 3, 2023, with then-prime minister Najla Bouden at his side. The story is not the rumour but the vacuum: when the presidency says nothing, any old video becomes news.
Journalist Zied El-Heni published a message on Monday, July 20, from Mornaguia civil prison defending a committed conception of journalism and closing with "freedom for the Tunisian press". He has been held since April 26 and was sentenced on May 7 by the Tunis court of first instance to one year in prison for "harming others through public communication networks" under article 86 of the telecommunications code, over remarks criticising judges; the appeal court upheld the sentence on June 26. The journalists' union SNJT has contested the use of article 86, a provision that, alongside decree-law 54, has become the standard instrument for prosecuting critical voices.
Steg's commercial director Hind Neifer told Diwan FM that rotating cuts are used only when the system reaches red alert, and that they are limited and targeted so as to avoid a nationwide blackout. The same day the utility published a load-shedding schedule for Monday and then warned of possible cuts until midnight, covering regions from Greater Tunis and Bizerte to Sfax, Gafsa and Tozeur. That a state monopoly has to explain publicly why the country is going dark in a heatwave turns the generation shortfall into a political question: the demand peaks arrive every summer, but capacity has not kept up.