On October 23, Tunisia voted for a Constituent Assembly, which is expected to write a new constitution for the nation. See this blog post at Fruits and Votes to read the details. The Assembly has 217 seats and its members were elected from 33 districts, using the party list system of proportional representation.
Here is the New York Times story about the results. It appears that the dominant party will be Ennahda, which is considered moderate Islamist. However, Ennahda probably won’t gain an absolute majority, and will almost certainly form a coalition government with two smaller parties. Thanks to Bob Richard and Thomas Jones for the links.
P.R. with pre-election candidate rank order lists.
Total Votes / Total Seats = EQUAL votes needed for each seat winner.
Move excess winner votes down and lowest loser votes up.
— pending head to head math.
Figures have been updated. It’s 90% now.
Good to see some Arab countries get a true shot of making their own mistakes. North Africa finally gets to rid itself of this dominating secularism that prevents religious folk, both Muslim, Christian and others from practising their faith. Hopefully Ennahda, and whatever comes from the ashes of Libya and the situation in Egypt be it religious based or not can prove, like in Turkey that you CAN be a practicing Muslim, be political and be different from the Al-Qaeda types.
As a British Islamist myself, the word is horribly tainted and prevents many Muslims from taking an active political role in Western countries outside of voting on the chance that they might be hounded by the media and the public as ‘terrorists’ and ‘invaders’. The treatment of CAIR in the US by many organisations is an excellent example of how regular freedom loving Muslims are derided purely for their religious belief.
That said, Ennahda and other Arab Spring Islamists can still get it wrong, simply being the first ones elected after decades of political and religious persecution doesn’t mean they’ll make good rulers, its up to them to prove its possible.
#2, thank you. You are right. I did a new blog post to show this.