7 (EUROPA PRESS)
The Independent High Authority for Elections (ISIE) of Tunisia announced this Monday that the Tunisian president, Kais Saied, has won this Sunday’s presidential elections with 90.69 percent of the votes in an election marked by low participation and for criticism of the electoral process.
The president of the ISIE, Faruk Buaskar, detailed in a press conference that Ayachi Zamel, leader of the liberal Azimun party, has managed to obtain 7.35 percent of the votes, followed by Zuhair Magzhaui, leader of the progressive People’s Movement (Echaab), with 1.97 percent of the support.
Likewise, the participation figure has stood at 28.8 percent, as reported by Buaskar. Nearly 9.7 million people were called to the polls in the framework of elections marked by the persecution and disqualification of several opponents, including Zamel, arrested and sentenced with three sentences totaling more than a decade in prison.
The estimate of the pollster Sigma Conseil, an unofficial private organization, gave 89.2 percent of the votes to Saied, while Zamel was predicted to have 6.9 percent of the ballots and Magzhaui, 3.9 percent. hundred.
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.
Tunisia, 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 with 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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