Tunisia votes for president to round off transition

TUNIS, Nov 18, (AFP): Tunisia holds its first multi-candidate presidential election on Sunday in the final stage of a post-revolution transition that has set it apart from the turmoil of other Arab Spring states.
Twenty-seven candidates are in the running, with former premier Beji Caid Essebsi, an 87-year-old veteran of Tunisian politics whose anti-Islamist party Nidaa Tounes won an October 26 parliamentary election, the hot favourite.
Among his challengers are outgoing President Moncef Marzouki, several ministers who served under Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Tunisia's longtime ruler who was ousted in a 2011 revolution that sparked the Arab Spring, leftwinger Hamma Hammami, business magnate Slim Riahi and a lone woman, magistrate Kalthoum Kannou.
A second round is to be contested at the end of December if the winner fails to secure an absolute majority.
Until the revolution the North African country had known only two heads of state: Habib Bourguiba, the "father of independence" from France in 1956, and then Ben Ali who deposed him in a December 7, 1987 coup.
Ben Ali held onto the president's Palais de Carthage until the revolt forced him to take flight to Saudi Arabia on January 14, 2011.