He is one of three candidates authorized by the electoral commission to run in the presidential elections on October 6. But former MP Ayachi Zammel was placed in preventive detention in Tunis on Wednesday, September 4, as part of an investigation into suspicion of “sponsorship falsification”his lawyers announced.
Zammel, 43, was arrested and taken into police custody on Monday. The industrialist, leader of the small and little-known liberal Azimoun party, has been the subject of a pre-trial detention order since Wednesday and is due to appear before the La Manouba court on Thursday, his legal team said in a statement.
This decision follows the exclusion from the race of three other candidates, considered serious rivals of the outgoing president, Kaïs Saïed, who are running for a second term, by the Electoral Authority (ISIE) earlier this week. The president, democratically elected in 2019, has been accused of authoritarian drift since a coup d’état on 25 July 2021 through which he gave himself full powers.
“Increased repression of dissent,” according to HRW
Ayachi Zammel is one of the three candidates selected on the list “definitive” The candidate was presented on Monday by ISIE, along with Saïed and Zouhair Maghzaoui, 59, a former deputy of the Pan-Arab left. The Tunisian courts accuse him of having violated the rules on sponsorship, as did the three candidates excluded by ISIE, despite the administrative court’s decision last week to reinstate them in the presidential race.
Abdellatif Mekki, former leader of the Islamo-conservative movement Ennahda, Mondher Zenaïdi, former minister in the Ben Ali regime, and Imed Daïmi, advisor to former President Moncef Marzouki, also close to Ennahda, were disqualified on 10 August along with fourteen other candidates, in particular for lack of sufficient sponsorship. The ISIE justified its rejection of the administrative court’s decisions by a formal defect: notification outside the legal period of forty-eight hours.
On Wednesday afternoon, the NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) asked ISIE to “immediately reverse its decision and end its political interference in the elections”stressing that the rulings of the administrative court are “legally binding”. “Instead of ensuring integrity”the ISIE, whose members were “appointed by the president”, “intervened to distort the vote in favour of Saïed”HRW criticized.
denouncing “increased repression of dissent, muzzling of the media and continued attacks on the independence of the judiciary”HRW estimated that the October 6 vote became “a parody of Tunisians’ right to free and fair elections”.
On Wednesday, nine political parties and nine NGOs, including the Tunisian League for Human Rights, announced the creation of a Tunisian Network for the Defense of Rights and Freedoms, which, according to local and international NGOs, has been in decline in the country since the summer of 2021. The day before, the trade union center UGTT described“illegal” the decision of the ISIE, which represents, in its eyes, “the implementation of a political decision” AND “a biased orientation that will previously influence the results” of the presidential election.
