Today, Sunday, the second round of legislative elections will be held in Tunisia, which will be held with the system of voting on individuals instead of lists for the first time in the country’s history, amid fears of a reluctance to vote, as happened in the first round.
And compete during this session 262 candidates who did not get a sufficient percentage of the votes during the first round of the elections in which only 23 out of 161 seats are the total number of seats in the new Tunisian parliament.
The first round of the elections witnessed a great reluctance to go to the polling stations, as only 11% of the total Tunisian electorate, estimated at 9,136,000 registered voters, participated.
For his part, the head of the Tunisian Independent High Authority for Elections, Farouk Bouaskar, said that the announcement of the final results of the second round of the legislative elections will be on the fourth of next March.
Parliament's powers
Tunisian President Qais Saeed took power on July 25, 2021, by freezing the work of parliament and later dissolving it, and approving a new constitution following a referendum last summer that ended the political system in place since 2014.
Saeed justified his decision at the time to disrupt the wheel of the state against the background of intense conflicts between the political blocs in Parliament.
The new parliament will have very few powers, as it cannot, for example, dismiss the president or hold him accountable, and the president has priority in proposing bills.
The new constitution does not require that the government appointed by the president obtain the confidence of parliament.
For its part, the opposition political parties - most notably the Ennahda Party, which had the largest blocs in parliament since the 2011 revolution - called for a boycott of the elections, considering what Saeed is doing as a "coup".