Seven votes decide the El Kabaria parliamentary by-election in Tunis

The electoral commission ISIE announced on July 20 that Chaker Bouthouri had taken the El Kabaria seat in the Tunis governorate in Sunday's run-off with 1,225 votes (50.14 percent) against 1,218 (49.86 percent) for Mohamed Salah Selmi, a margin of seven ballots out of 2,443 cast. In the first round in late June the top two were six votes apart, and about 3,000 of the district's more than 60,000 registered voters turned out: a participation rate of roughly 4 percent on ISIE's own figures. When individual seats in the chamber elected under Kaïs Saïed's rewritten electoral law are settled by a handful of voters, it is the clearest available measure of how far Tunisians have disengaged from the institution.

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