Aug. 27 (EUROPA PRESS) –
A Tunisian court on Tuesday cleared the way for Action and Realisation party candidate Abdellatif Mekki to run in the October 6 presidential election, which will be contested by Tunisia’s current president Kais Saied, after his candidacy was rejected by the electoral authority.
The candidacy of the former leader of the conservative Islamist party Ennahda and former health minister was initially rejected along with those of thirteen other candidates, although a court ruled in his favour on Tuesday.
Mekki was sentenced to eight months in prison for vote-buying in the run-up to the presidential election. He was also charged in connection with the murder of politician Jilani Daboussi in 2014, but was released last July on condition that he not leave the country.
However, the application of candidate Néji Jallul, a former Tunisian education minister, has been rejected. The court is expected to announce four other pending cases on Thursday, according to the TAP news agency.
The opposition, which is largely based around the National Salvation Front (FSN), has been denouncing the authoritarian drift of the country’s president for more than two years and has demanded his resignation, especially in light of the wave of arrests of opponents, activists and journalists, as well as the low participation rates in the constitutional referendum and the elections held since then in Tunisia.
Saied assumed additional powers in 2021 when he shut down the elected parliament, dominated by the Islamist party Ennahda, and went on to rule by decree before assuming authority over the judiciary, a move that took over all state powers and was widely seen by critics as a self-coup.
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