A Tunisian court has sentenced four potential presidential candidates to eight months in prison and banned them from running on charges of vote-buying, the ruling coming on the last day to submit nominations for the October 6 presidential election.
Just yesterday, the dossier of the favorite arrived, the incumbent president Kais Saied, an ally of Europe and Italy in the fight against irregular migration flows, who declared that he had collected 240 thousand signatures in support of his re-candidacy. Race against time instead for the former minister of Ben Ali, Mondher Zenaidi, exiled in Paris since 2011, who filed his file through his legal representative, without the B3, or null criminal record, a necessary requirement for candidacy, a document that he plans to file today.
Opponents eliminated from the race
Retired Admiral Kamel Akrout, who announced his candidacy months ago, said he was withdrawing precisely because he was unable to obtain the criminal record from the administration. And it is precisely the draconian acceptance criteria for the presentation of candidacies, including the sponsorship of 10 parliamentarians or 40 presidents of local authorities or 10,000 voters with at least 500 signatures in 10 different constituencies, and the difficulty reported by many candidates in obtaining the B3, that will mean that the admitted candidates will be less than a dozen, and among them there will not be those with the greatest chance of succeeding, condemned by the court.
Italy signs new agreements with Tunisia to continue stopping migrants
Sentences were handed down to prominent politician Abdel Latif Mekki, activist Nizar Chaari, judge Mourad Massoudi and another candidate, Adel Dou. Ahmed Nafatti, Mekki’s campaign manager, said the candidate still intended to submit his candidacy papers.
“The decision is unfair and unjust and aims to exclude a serious actor from the race,” he said in a complaint. Another court sentenced Abir Moussi, another prominent opponent of Saied, to two years in prison on charges of insulting the electoral commission, local radio station Mosaiqueradio reported. Last month, a court sentenced Lotfi Mraihi, another potential presidential candidate and a fierce critic of Saied, to eight months in prison on charges of vote-buying.
Authoritarian President
Kais Saied has been president of Tunisia since 2019, when he was elected as an independent candidate in a runoff with 72% of the vote. Two years later, in the midst of the pandemic, he unilaterally assumed full constitutional powers, dismissing Prime Minister Hichem Mechichi and members of the government and freezing the activities of Parliament, then dissolving it altogether, in what has been called a “self-coup”. Since then, he has ruled by decree until he managed to approve a new constitution that gave him greater powers, through a disputed referendum in July 2022 in which only 30% of those eligible to vote showed up at the polls. He then called snap legislative elections that saw a measly 8% turnout.
The pacts with Europe
However, the European Union signed a Memorandum of Understanding with him on July 16, 2023, with the aim of stopping migrants arriving from Africa, despite the country being accused of violence against people arriving in the nation, who would be forcibly pushed back to Libya and Algeria and abandoned in the desert. Giorgia Meloni’s government has also made several agreements with the nation. The prime minister went to Tunis in April to sign the three pacts with Saied.
