2019 Presidential Polls: Election campaign ends Friday at midnight

Launched on September 2, the election campaign for the early presidential election ends Friday at midnight. Saturday, September 14, is an election day of silence, while Tunisians are invited to vote one day later.

In this election by universal suffrage, the President must obtain an absolute majority of votes to be elected in the first round. Otherwise, the two candidates with the highest number of votes will be opposed in a second round, the date of which is not known.

Abroad, voting for the presidential election began on Thursday at 11 p.m. (local time), with the opening of a single polling station in Sydney, Australia. This polling station was supposed to accommodate 203 voters, according to the Independent High Electoral Authority (ISIE).

Some 386,053 registered Tunisians in 44 foreign countries have already started voting on Friday and for three days in 302 polling stations well equipped for the occasion.

The last polling station to close would be the centre of San Francisco, in the United States.

The electoral campaign has been marked in recent days by the intensification of candidates’ activities in all governorates of the Republic. They took the opportunity to present the main lines of their programmes.

But this campaign probably focused on organizing, for the first time in the history of Tunisia, three televised debates, supposed to help citizens choose between 26 candidates for the Supreme Court.

During these debates broadcast on the public channel TV al Wataniya 1, the candidates answered, in a short period of time, rigorously timed, to the questions drawn by lot, relating to several subjects falling within the prerogatives of the Presidency of the Republic.

But the main absentees from these televised political evenings are undoubtedly the controversial businessmen “Nabil Karoui” and “Slim Riahi”.
The former has been in prison since 23 August for money laundering and tax evasion, while the latter is the subject of a judicial inquiry and is currently abroad.

TunisianMonitorOnline

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