Marzouki rejects bill allowing security personnel vote in Tunisia elections

Tunisia’s former president, Moncef Marzouki, has criticised the Tunisian parliament’s approval of a draft bill allowing the Tunisian armed forces and police to vote in municipal elections scheduled later this year.

Marzouki said in remarks to Quds Press yesterday: “I have always believed that the armed forces and police must be neutral in the elections.”

Marzouki expressed regret for what he described as “the wrong path taken by the democratic experiment in Tunisia.”

“The democratic experience in Tunisia is not a model as the government describes it,” Marzouki said, saying there was so much corruption in the last elections with little oversight of what the main political parties were doing, that the vast majority of youth were no longer “interested in this democracy.”

He added: “Our democracy is very fragile. Freedoms are threatened today, and the media is plagued with corruption. There is no participatory democracy”.

The Tunisian parliament passed on Tuesday a draft bill allowing the armed forces and police to vote in municipal elections scheduled for later this year.

The clause on security personnel voting was passed as part of a draft bill on municipal elections by 144 deputies. Eleven deputies rejected the clause and three abstained.