Manama: Tunisians woke up to a quiet and splendid day, resuming their daily routine after an historic day in which they cast ballots to elect a constituent assembly.
Only students and teachers had an extra day off to allow election organisers to clear the schools where voting centres had been set up.
While Tunisians congratulated themselves on incident-free elections and proudly displayed their blue index fingers as a potent sign of their participation, speculation was rife about which parties will form the assembly tasked with drafting a new constitution and choosing an interim president and an interim prime minister.
Full confidence
The official results will be announced today, Kamal Jendoubi, the head of the Independent Higher Commission for the Elections, said.
Tunisians in general said that they would wait patiently for the results before drawing their conclusions.
"We now have full confidence in the commission and the people tasked with running the elections," Mohammad Fareh, a technician, said. "If there is any problem, any tampering with anything or any use of political money, they will tell us. So, let us just wait for another couple of days and we will see," he said.
Difficulties
Sami Bin Slama, a member of the Independent Higher Commission for the Elections, yesterday attributed the announcement of the results today to the "difficulties in counting the votes."
"The process takes a long time because it is done manually from start to finish," he told the media. "We did not go for an automatic count because we did not want to take any risks that would hurt the credibility and transparency of the elections and results," he said.
The commission member said that results mentioned by some online sites could be true "because the results are posted in the voting locales".
But for the print media, the story now is the success of the elections following weeks of hope, pride, trepidation and anxiety.
