Tunisian coalition rejects presidential proposal to raise electoral threshold

The independent “Soumoud” (Resilience) coalition rejected Monday, a proposal by the Tunisian president to amend the electoral law to raise the electoral threshold to 5 per cent, starting with the upcoming legislative elections.

The project proposes to adopt the threshold of 5 per cent, instead of the current 3 per cent, to count votes at the constituency level, as a condition for parliamentary representation.

The coalition held, in Tunis today, a seminar entitled: “The Electoral System in Tunisia”.

The Soumoud is a civil coalition formed at the beginning of 2017 of independent associations, including The “Bardo Sit-in Coordination,” The “National Initiative,” The “Tunisia Tamarrod (Insurgency) Movement” and The “Union of Independents”.

On the sidelines of the conference, Hossam Al-Hami, the coalition’s coordinator, told Anadolu that “The threshold of 5 per cent is not good for the democratic transition process in Tunisia.”

“The threshold of 5 per cent will eliminate independents that have emerged in the last municipal elections. Also, small parties can be disintegrated,” he said.

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Al-Hami said: “There are intellectual movements in the country, such as political Islam, the left, the constitutionals, the moderates, and the nationalists, which are big movements in Tunisia. They must be represented in parliament.”

At the same time, he stressed that “the electoral law should not eliminate part of the Tunisian people permanently from the parliament.”

In September, the Tunisian government pushed for a draft amendment to the electoral law proposed by the Presidency of the Republic and is expected to be presented to the plenary session of Parliament to consider its adoption.

The government said that such a threshold would “shorten the electoral landscape and lead the vote to more focused targets.”

During the conference, the “Soumoud” coalition distributed a petition against the adoption of the 5-per cent threshold in the electoral law, ahead of the legislative elections expected next year.

In the petition, the coalition considered that this “threshold would lead to a clear monopoly of political power by two poles.”

He said that it would lead to “an unbalanced sharing of this monopolized power by a large party by virtue of its extensive structure and material potential (i.e Ennahda Movement) and a weak and politically insignificant party (which he did not name), which would mean the rise of tyrannical rule and  gradual return to the one-party system in Tunisia.”