Professor fights prisoner in Tunisia’s presidential campaign

NABEUL, Tunisia — The professor refuses to campaign for president and the prisoner cannot, yet both are running for Tunisia’s highest office.

Tunisian voters sent two political outsiders into the presidential runoff, forcing a choice between an obscure conservative law professor who believes Tunisians know enough about him already and a media magnate whose face is plastered over posters nationwide, but who’s been in jail for the last month on corruption allegations.

Professor Kais Saied is refusing to hold rallies, print posters or use any of the usual marketing that drives a modern presidential campaign. He won the first round on Sept. 15, with 18% of the vote.

In second with 15% support was Nabil Karaoui, a jailed media mogul who sends out Facebook missives and letters via his wife and lawyers but otherwise must rely upon supporters and his longstanding reputation as the head of a charity that hands out macaroni and other gifts to the poor — or potential voters, depending on your perspective. He denies the charges, claiming they aim to hurt him at the polls.

Those results mean that fewer than one in five who voted in the first presidential round will actually get the leader they wanted, a major test for Tunisia’s young democracy. The runoff is set for Oct. 13.

The North African nation on the Mediterranean Sea was the fountainhead of the 2011 Arab Spring protests, touched off by the self-immolation of a young fruit vendor. It already has elected one president, who died this summer at 92. It has also elected a parliament, dominated by the Islamist Ennahdha party. But Ennahdha’s candidate was resoundingly defeated in the first presidential round on Sept. 15 — a message the party has acknowledged as it threw its support behind Saied.

The authoritarian leader ousted in the 2011 protests, Zine el-Abidine...