MADRID 6 Oct. (EUROPA PRESS) –
Participation in the presidential elections in Tunisia being held this Sunday is 14.16 percent until 2:00 p.m. (time in mainland Spain and the Balearic Islands), in line with the popular disaffection of the last elections in the country.
To give an example, total participation in the 2019 elections was 48.9 percent in the first round, and 55 percent in the second vote. Last year, only 11.66 percent of the nine million voters went to the polls in local elections.
The president of Tunisia, Kais Saied, attributed the low participation rate in the elections to local councils to the “rejection” by the population of the functioning of the previous Parliament, whose powers the president assumed in 2021, a decision qualified by its critics as a textbook example of authoritarian drift.
In his appearance before the media, the president of the Independent High Authority for Elections, Faruk Buaskar, added that the participation rate in the presidential elections abroad, held on Friday and Saturday, reached 10 percent.
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.
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