Foregone conclusion

As predicted, Tunisian leader Zeine Al-Abidine Ben Ali won a landslide victory in Sunday's presidential poll, reports Aysha Ramadan from Tunis

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An elderly woman takes ballots in Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia, on the outskirts of Tunis, before voting for the presidential and parliamentary elections, Sunday

The Tunisian elections held on 24 October handed a fourth term to incumbent President Zeine Al- Abidine Ben Ali. But then that was the point of revoking the constitutional reform instituted following the overthrow of Habib Bourguiba in 1987, restricting a president to three successive terms.

Ben Ali swept the polls with 94.48 per cent of the vote, while his Democratic Constitutional Rally Party won an overwhelming parliamentary majority: 152 seats as opposed to the 37 seats distributed among the so-called "happy" opposition parties -- political groups in cahoots with the government. The results surprised no one. In fact, three days before election day the Tunisian dailies, Al-Shuruq and Al- Sabah, had precisely forecast the returns, including how the 37 parliamentary seats would breakdown among the opposition parties. As they predicted, 14 seats went to the Movement of Socialist Democrats (MDS), 11 to the Popular Unity Party (PUP), seven to the Unionist Democratic Union (UDU) and two to the Liberal Social Party (PSL).

Also in keeping with their forecast, the Attajdid (Renovation) Movement won only three seats, two down from the five it had held in the previous parliament, while the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP), which they had not even bothered to mention, won none.

The outcome led Suheir Ben Hassan of the Tunisian League for Human Rights to declare to AFP that the Tunisian authorities had rewarded loyal parties and punished insubordinate ones. The latter included Attajdid and PUP which authorities regarded as having deviated from the "responsible opposition" over the past two years. Moreover, one of these -- Attajdid -- had the audacity to field a candidate for the presidency: Mohamed Ali Al- Halawani, a professor of philosophy at the University of Tunis.

Although Al-Halawani garnered just under one per cent of the vote according to official figures, his campaign was viewed by many observers as the only serious opposition and won the respect of a number of influential opposition figures, some of whom had initially called for a boycott to the elections. These included the publisher/journalist Siham Ben Sidrin, member of the National Council for Civil Liberties Omar Al-Mastiri, former minister Mohamed Al- Sharafi and former dean of the faculty of law in the University of Tunis Ayad Ben Ashour.

The 57-year-old philosophy professor's campaign initiative was having such an impact that Tunisian authorities confiscated his party's electoral manifesto and barred its parliamentary candidates from access to public television, in response to which they staged a protest demonstration that marched through the capital until it was intercepted before reaching the Ministry of Interior.

Mahmoud Ben Ramadan, one of the main participants in this initiative, maintains that in spite of the government's many infringements on the rules of the democratic process, the initiative succeeded in opening a breach and winning the sympathy of the electorate, especially within the labour syndicates. "Our initiative has revived hope among a broad sector of the Tunisian people," he said.

Meanwhile, PUP member Rashid Khashana, who had withdrawn his candidacy for the parliament three days before the polls in protest against electoral irregularities, said that until then his party had put its faith in the integrity of the electoral process. The sense of dismay was also expressed by former MP Salem Rajab who said that electoral process "is dull, flat and tasteless", and that it would probably remain so for the next ten years.

This may well be the case as long, as the lawyer Al-Mukhtar Al-Tarifi put it, "people who forge metro tickets are punished while people who forge elections go free".