three presidential candidates selected, three others definitively excluded

The Independent High Authority for Elections (ISIE) in Tunisia decided on Monday, September 2, to retain only three candidates for the presidential election of October 6, including the outgoing president Kaïs Saïed, and to exclude three other candidates who had been readmitted by the administrative court last week.

“The administrative court has not officially communicated its decisions [à l’autorité électorale] within the 48-hour period as required by law”announced the head of the ISIE, Farouk Bouasker, to justify the exclusion of three other candidates.

The list announced on August 10 “is final and not subject to any appeal”Bouasker added in a statement broadcast on national television. Aside from the incumbent president, the two other candidates are Zouhair Maghzaoui, a former member of parliament for the pan-Arab left, and Ayachi Zammel, a little-known industrialist who heads a small liberal party. Zammel was arrested at dawn on Monday on suspicion of false endorsements in his candidacy file, a member of his campaign team said.

Last week, the administrative court meeting on appeal had accepted, to everyone’s surprise, the appeals of three candidates, considered serious competitors to President Kaïs Saïed. The latter, democratically elected in 2019, has been accused of authoritarianism since a coup on July 25, 2021, during which he granted himself full powers.

The candidates readmitted by the court were Abdellatif Mekki, a former leader of the conservative Islamist movement Ennahda, Mondher Zenaïdi, a former minister of the Ben Ali regime, and Imed Daïmi, an adviser to former president Moncef Marzouki, also close to Ennahda.

On Saturday, 26 Tunisian and international NGOs and nearly 200 personalities including many lawyers had called in a petition the Isie to respect the decisions of the Administrative Court, stressing that they were “enforceable and could not be contested”.