Tunisia’s main Islamist party predicted it would secure 40 percent of the country’s first ever free polls, as the birth place of the Arab Spring basked in the world’s praise for its democratic revolution. Official results are due on Tuesday but provisional results released by some media outlets appeared to confirm Ennahda’s prediction it would control around 40 percent of Tunisia’s constituent assembly. The body Tunisians turned out en masse to elect on Sunday is seen as the custodian of the pro-democracy revolution which brought dictator Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s 23-year-old rule to a crushing end nine months ago. “We are not far from 40 percent. It could be a bit more or a bit less, but we are sure to take 24 (of the 27) voting districts,” Samir Dilou, a member of Ennahda’s political bureau said, quoting “our sources”.
The polls, for which over 90 percent of some 4.1 million registered voters turned out, won hearty acclaim from world leaders closely scrutinising developments on the soil of the Arab Spring’s trailblazer. “This landmark election constitutes a key step in the democratic transition of the country and a significant development in the overall democratic transformation in North Africa and the Middle East,” UN chief Ban Ki-moon said. Analysts widely predicted Ennahda to win the most votes but fall short of a majority in Sunday’s elections for a new 217-member assembly that will rewrite the constitution and appoint a president to form a caretaker government.
The assembly will decide on the country’s system of government and how to guarantee basic liberties, including women’s rights, which many fear Ennahda would seek to diminish despite its assurances to the contrary. It will also have interim authority to write laws and pass budgets. Ennahda says it models itself on the ruling AKP party in Turkey, another Muslim-majority country which like Tunisia to date has a secular state. Its critics have accused Ennahda of preaching modernism in public and radicalism in the mosques, but Tunisia’s progressive left remains divided with party leaders having failed to form a pre-vote alliance.
This was Tunisia’s first-ever electoral contest without a pre-determined outcome, and the first run by an independent electoral body after decades of ballot-stuffing by the interior ministry. The electoral system was designed to include as many parties as possible in drafting the new constitution, expected to take a year, ahead of fresh national elections. The current, interim government will remain in power until the assembly appoints a new president, not before November 9.
