Tunisia’s polling stations open for the presidential elections

MADRID 6 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –

The electoral colleges of Tunisia have opened their doors at 09:00 this Sunday for the celebration of presidential elections where the president Kais Saied, accused by his critics of making his mandate an example of authoritarianism, is the great favorite to remain in office. .

The polls will remain open until 7:00 p.m. (mainland Spain and Balearic Islands time). During the next ten hours, the 9.7 million registered voters will have the opportunity to elect their president for the next five years, at 9,669 polling stations throughout the country.

Saied, who in the 2019 elections won the second round with 72.7 percent of the votes – compared to 27.3 percent collected by tycoon Nabil Karui, who remained imprisoned for most of the electoral campaign – , has led a campaign of increasing repression since 2021 that has limited civic space, calling into question the representativeness of the elections.

The president faces two candidates of little weight: Zuhair Magzhaui, leader of the People’s Movement (Echaab) – which he has headed since 2013 following the assassination of the then head of the party, Mohamed Brahmi, one of the main leaders of the Tunisian left. –, and Ayachi Zamel, leader of the liberal Azimun party, imprisoned during the electoral campaign.

The country, considered one of the few examples of democratic success after the outbreak of the ‘Arab Spring’, has suffered during the last five years a setback in rights and freedoms that has been attributed to the president, which has led its critics to draw parallels between him and Zine el Abidine ben Ali, who governed the country from 1987 to 2011, and whose long mandate ended precisely with this revolution.