Islamists set for power after strong vote for Muslim parties in Tunisia’s first democratic elections since revolution. 90 per cent turn out to vote in the country’s first ever free and fair elections
Tunisia’s main Islamist party is on its way to power after the first truly free and fair elections in the country’s history. Early results from individual voting stations carried by local radio stations this morning put the Islamist Ennahda Party in the lead in many constituencies. Tunisians voted yesterday to elect a constituent assembly in the first elections emerging from the so-called Arab Spring uprisings around the Middle East.
Electoral officials are still counting the votes and results are not expected until later today or tomorrow. Boubker Bethabet, secretary general of Tunisia’s election commission, said that more than 90 per cent of the 4.1million registered voters cast their votes.
Radio Mosaique FM posted results from polling stations around the country with many showing a commanding lead for Ennahda.
In the more affluent Tunis suburb of al-Aouina, Zeinab Souayah, an 18-year-old language student and former protester said: ‘I’m going to grow up and think back on these days and tell my children about them.’
‘It feels great, it’s awesome,’ she added, in English. The ballot was an extra-large piece of paper bearing the names and symbols of the parties fielding a candidate in each district.
The symbols are meant to aid the illiterate, estimated at about 25 per cent of the population in one of the most educated countries in the region. Voters in each of the country’s 33 districts, six of which are abroad, had roughly 40 to 80 ballot choices.
It was a cacophony of options in a country effectively under one-party rule since independence from France in 1956. The moderate Islamic movement Ennahda, or Renaissance, is expected to win the most seats in the assembly, although no one party is expected to win a majority.
An Ennahda victory, especially in a comparatively secular society like Tunisia, could have wide implications for similar religious parties in the region. Retired engineer Bahri Mohamed Lebid, 73, said he voted ‘for my religion,’ a sentiment common among supporters of the Ennahda movement.
He said he last tried to vote in 1974, when polling officers forced him to cast a ballot for the ruling party despite his objections. Ennahda believes that Islam should be the reference point for the country’s system and laws and believes that democracy is the best system to maintain people’s rights. It has also said it supports Tunisia’s liberal laws promoting women’s equality – making it much more progressive than other Islamic movements in the Middle East.
Some voters expressed concern that despite its moderate public line, Ennahda could reverse some of Tunisia’s progressive legislation for women if it gains power. ’I am looking for someone to protect the place of women in Tunisia,’ said 34-year-old Amina Helmi, her hair free of the headscarves that some Tunisian women wear.
She said she was ‘afraid’ of Ennahda and voted for the center-left PDP party, the strongest legal opposition movement under Ben Ali. A proportional representation system will likely mean that no political party will dominate the assembly, which is expected to be divided roughly among centrist parties, leftist parties and Ennahda.
They will need to form coalitions and make compromises to create a constitution. But many ordinary Tunisians said they felt indifferent about the elections, out of frustration that life has not improved since January’s revolution.
Tunisia’s economy and employment, part of the reason for the uprising in the first place, have only got worse since Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia, in part because tourists and foreign investors have stayed away. Outside the school-turned-polling station in Hay al-Tadammon, a group of young men sat on the street, sipping tea and mocking journalists who were talking to people who had just voted.
Belhussein al-Maliki, 27, said he fought in the January uprising, which engulfed this downtrodden suburb, and lost a relative in the fighting. ’We are jobless, we have nothing and we won’t vote,’ he said bitterly. ‘Everything is the same, the world is the way it is, and the world will stay the way it is.’
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