Law professor leads tight presidential race
TUNIS, Tunisia — With more than half the votes in Tunisia’s presidential race counted, a former conservative constitutional law professor without a party was in the lead.
The body in charge of elections said Monday that Kais Saied, 61, was on top with 18.7%. It said 52% of the ballots cast in Sunday’s vote have been counted.
Media magnate Nabil Karoui, a more modernizing candidate, was in second place with 15.5%. Karoui, 56, has been in jail since last month on money laundering and tax evasion charges, but was allowed to run because he hasn’t been convicted.
Karoui’s supporters quickly declared victory, and his wife, Salwa, said his legal team is pushing for his release. She read a letter he wrote from jail in which he said the apparent results reflected “the Tunisian people’s wish to see change, to say no to injustice, no to poverty, no to marginalization and yes to a fair state.”
In line with Sunday night’s postvote projections, Abdelfattah Mourou of the moderate Islamist party Ennahdha, was third with 13.1%, followed by Defense Minister Abdeldrim Zbidi and Prime Minister Youssef Chahed, who had been considered a top contender.
The electoral commission announced that overall turnout was a relatively low 45%. If no candidate wins more than 50% of Sunday’s vote, the election goes to a second round. The exact date of the runoff will be announced once the final firstround results are declared.
Both Saied and Karoui promised to fight unemployment, a key problem in Tunisia that also helped drive its 2011 revolution.
Saied has no political background but notably picked up support among young voters with his straightforward, antisystem image and constitutional law background. Corruption frustrates many voters, which might have increased the appeal of an outsider candidate.
Karoui, meanwhile, positioned himself as the candidate of the poor, notably using his TV network to raise money for charity. His arrest appears to have mobilized voters in the struggling provinces or those who feel sidelined in the Tunisian economy.
The voting followed a noisy but brief campaign — 12 days — marked by backbiting and charges of corruption among the contenders. All vowed to boost the country’s flagging economy and protect it from further deadly attacks by Islamist extremists.
Tunisia is in many ways an exception in the Arab world, with its budding democracy lurching forward despite challenges. Some 6,000 Tunisian and international observers, including from the European Union and the United States, monitored the vote.
More than 100,000 security forces were on guard Sunday as 7 million registered voters went to the polls. Military surveillance was especially tight in border regions near Algeria and Libya where Islamist extremists are active.
Complete results must be announced by Tuesday.