TUNISIA’S MODERATE Islamist party was the biggest winner of Sunday’s landmark election, the first official results confirmed yesterday.
Partial returns from the country’s first free elections suggested Ennahda would emerge as the largest single party but would fall short of a majority.
A coalition government comprising Islamists and secularists is now likely.
For Ennahda, the results cap a major turnaround. The party was ruthlessly repressed under the 23-year rule of deposed president Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, its leading figures jailed or exiled. But it emerged after January’s revolution as the best-organised political group in the country. It campaigned as a moderate force determined to protect Tunisia’s strong minority and women’s rights.
Sunday’s election was the first since the so-called Arab Spring began last winter, when the country’s revolutionaries forced Ben Ali from power in an event that would reverberate across the region. Parties were vying for places in a 217-seat assembly charged with writing a new constitution and choosing an interim president and government.
Although final results are not expected until today, the electoral commission said more than 90 per cent of some 4.1 million registered voters had cast their ballot. There were as yet no figures for the 3.1 million others who did not register but could still vote at special polling stations.
Attention will now turn to a possible coalition between Ennahda and left-wing and secularist groups which performed strongly.
Moncef Marzouki, the former dissident whose secularist Congress for the Republic was in second place, said he was ready to work with Ennahda and other parties. “I am for a coalition government,” he said. “We wish to have a national government as wide as possible with all the parties.”
Ennahda officials named Mr Marzouki’s party, and the left-wing secularist Ettakatol party, as favoured partners. Their presence in a coalition government may help reassure Tunisia’s liberals.
Another secularist party, the Progressive Democrats, rejected a coalition on the grounds that Ennahda, it argues, is intent on rolling back decades of socially liberal legislation.
Ennahda has insisted on its moderate credentials, promoting women candidates – including one who does not wear a hijab – and pledging to strengthen laws on equal pay and sexual harassment.
“People must accept that there are different versions of political Islam,” party leader Rachid Ghannouchi – recently returned from 22 years in exile – has said. “We are much closer to the [ruling] AKP of Turkey than we can ever be to the Taliban or bin Laden.”
Ennahda ran the best-organised campaign, with candidates in every constituency and an impressive ground operation that was expected to have paid off, particularly in its rural heartlands.
In the only challenge to the early results, 400 people protested outside the electoral commission building in Tunis yesterday alleging Ennahda was guilty of vote fraud.