Tunisia’s government plans to hold the second round of legislative elections for the majority of seats during the first week of February after just 11 percent of those called to vote turned out to vote in the polls, held this Saturday.
This was detailed by executive sources to Bloomberg news agency, after Tunisia’s National Electoral Commission reported a low turnout among the 9.1 million Tunisians eligible to vote.
The vote has also left the fate of 131 seats in the 161-member Congress undecided. It may now be months before the new assembly is installed, according to the commission’s spokesman, Mohamed Tlili Mansri.
Meanwhile, the president of the Maghreb country, Kais Saied, has addressed the opposition’s reactions to the high abstention by stating that «they have found nothing to focus on except the percentage of participation in this first round».
«Some parties found nothing to focus on except the percentage of participation (…) while the percentage of participation is not measured only in the first round but in the two rounds,» he has asserted in a statement from the Tunisian Presidency.
Saied insisted on this last idea by comparing it to a soccer match: «This attitude (…) is similar to announcing the result of a match in a sports newspaper at the end of its first half».
Different Tunisian opposition parties have highlighted as a political victory the very low turnout in the legislative elections held this Saturday in Tunisia after their call for abstention in protest against the concentration of power in the hands of President Saied.
«The turnout in the elections has confirmed that people are disappointed with Kais Saied,» stressed a spokesman for the National Front, Ahmed Nayib, calling the abstention an «earthquake of eight degrees of magnitude on the Richter scale,» Tunisian radio station Mosaique FM reported.
He therefore called last Saturday on the Tunisian people, civil society organizations and associations and the country’s personalities to mobilize, close ranks and participate in protests and rallies to «overthrow» the «regime of July 25, 2021» in reference to the date on which Saied ordered the dissolution of the Government and the suspension of the Parliament.
Source: (EUROPA PRESS)
