Tunisian general election, 2009

On October 25, 2009, national elections to elect the president and parliament were held in Tunisia in what was described by a Human Rights Watch report as "an atmosphere of repression".[51] Ben Ali faced three candidates, two of whom said they actually supported the incumbent[citation needed]. No independent observer was allowed to monitor the vote.[citation needed] Zinedine Ben Ali, won a landslide victory, with 89.62%. His opponent, Mohamed Bouchiha, received 5.01%. The candidate who was most critical of the regime, Ahmed Ibrahim, of the Ettajdid party, received only 1.57% after a campaign in which he was not allowed to put posters up or hold any kind of meeting.[52] The president's party, the CDR, also got the majority of votes for the parliamentary election, 84.59%. The Movement of Socialist Democrats party received 4.63%.[citation needed]

The election received criticism in foreign media.[53] Human Rights Watch has reported that parties and candidates were denied exposure equal to the sitting president, and that the Ettajdid party's weekly publication, Ettarik al-Jadid, was seized by authorities.[54] According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, "97% of newspaper campaign coverage was devoted to President Ben Ali amid severe restrictions on independent reporting. Ben Ali’s government went after the country’s journalist union, bringing down its democratically elected board, while his police bullied and harassed critical reporters. Two journalists, one of them a leading critic of the president, were in jail later in the year. Journalist Taoufik Ben Brik, who had published two articles in French newspapers that were critical of the regime, has been incarcerated since October 29, 2009. The Court of Appeal upheld a sentence of nine years on 3 January 2010 in a trial that "confirmed the complete absence of independence of the Tunisian legal system" the defendant's French lawyer William Bourdon said [55] Florence Beaugé, a correspondent for the French daily Le Monde, tried to cover the polling but was put on a flight back to Paris on October 21

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