Tunisia: Low turn out recorded in first legislative vote since parliament dissolution

The electoral authority in Tunisia officially announced on Monday a turnout of 11.22% in Saturday's parliamentary elections, very slightly up from the preliminary figure of 8.8% made public after the closure of the polls.

The final turnout was announced by the president of the electoral authority Isie, Farouk Bouasker, at a press conference in Tunis.

Even revised upwards, this turnout is the lowest since the revolution that toppled the dictatorship in 2011, after records (nearly 70% in the October 2014 legislative) and is three times less than for the referendum on the Constitution last summer (30.5%), already marked by a high abstention. According to Bouasker, 1.025 million people out of just over 9 million registered voters cast their ballots.

The head of the main coalition of opponents in Tunisia, Ahmed Nejib Chebbi, called on President Kais Saied to "leave immediately", after the fiasco of massive abstention in the legislative elections, boycotted by the opposition.

After his coup de force on July 25, 2021 and the dissolution of the old Parliament, denounced as a "coup d'état" by the opposition, President Saied had a constitution adopted this summer that drastically reduces the prerogatives of Parliament.

The new Assembly of MPs will not be able to dismiss the president and it will be almost impossible for it to censure the government. It will take ten deputies to propose a law, and the president will have priority in getting his laws passed.