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Last foreign minister of Tunisia's ousted dictator to run for presidential elections

September 14, 2014 at 7:07 pm

The Tunisian Initiative Party has announced the nomination of its chairman Kamal Morgan to the 2014 presidential elections, the Deutsche Presse Agentur reported.

Morgan was the last foreign minister under the ousted longtime dictator Zainal Abidin Ben Ali.

According to the spokesperson of the party, as quoted by DPA, Morgan received more than 10,000 endorsements from supporters, which makes him eligible to run for presidency.

The electoral law mandates the endorsement of a minimum of 10,000 eligible voters or 10 members of parliament for each presidential candidate.

Morgan, 66, is a former diplomat at the UN, where he worked since 1977. He first worked for UNHCR and held several posts there, the last of which was the assistant secretary general in 1999.

Morgan was appointed permanent ambassador at the Geneva UN headquarters in 1996 and held the position of the minister of defense under Ben Ali in 2005, then foreign minister in 2010 until the outbreak of the 2011 revolution. He remained foreign minister in the interim government that followed the revolution, then resigned and founded his own party, the Initiative Party, which won five seats in the 2011 constitutional assembly.

Two other members of Ben Ali’s regime will run for presidency, namely former ministers Abdel Rahim El-Zawawy and Al-Monzer Al-Zanaidi.

The Tunisian presidential elections are scheduled for November 23, 2014.