Tunisia opposition: Election law limits participation

The Head of the Tunisian National Salvation Front, Ahmed Najib Chebbi, believes that the new electoral law came to limit the freedom of participation in legislative elections.

This came in a speech by Chebbi on Tuesday during a press conference in the capital, Tunis, in which he said: “All these circumstances confirm that this law is not valid to create a representative body (parliament), but rather it perpetuates a base system that (President) Kais Saied seeks to build.”

On Thursday, President Saied issued an order calling citizens to participate in the legislative elections on 17 December, besides a decree to revise (amend) the electoral law to depend on voting according to individuals and re-divide the constituencies.

According to the first article of the Presidential order, “Voters are invited on Saturday, 17 December, to elect the members of the House of People’s Representatives (Parliament), while voters who reside abroad are invited to vote on Thursday 15, Friday 16 and Saturday 17, December 2022.”

READ: Tunisia’s Ennahda supports initiative to form political front against the ‘coup’

For his part, Ennahda spokesperson, Imad Khamiri, confirmed, during the press conference, that the purpose of what happened yesterday, Monday, during the investigation with the Ennahda’s President, Rashid Ghannouchi, and his deputy, Ali Laarayedh, is to punish the national leaders and silence the voices that oppose the coup (with reference to Saied’s measures).

Last Sunday, Riadh Chaibi, the political advisor to the President of the Ennahda Movement, Rashid Ghannouchi, announced that Ghannouchi and his deputy, Laarayedh, received an order to appear for investigation before the Anti-Terrorism Squad on the case of “deportation to hotbeds of tension and terrorism” outside the country.

Khamiri considered that serious abuses occurred yesterday that violate human rights during the investigation, when Ghannouchi was kept from midday until three a.m. the next morning, without asking him any questions on the investigation.

Khamiri believed that this is considered a violation of rights and freedoms and a form of torture exercised on a free citizen, who came of his own free will for investigation in a fabricated case and file.