Zine El Abidine Ben Ali with the president, and there was little meaningful opposition to executive decisions. In 1999, Ben Ali became the first Tunisian president to actually face an opponent after the 30-signature requirement was lifted a few months earlier. However, he won a third full term with an implausible 99.4 percent of the vote. A constitutional referendum in 2002—the first ever held in Tunisia—established a two-chambered parliament, creating the Chamber of Advisers. It also allowed the president to run for an unlimited number of five-year terms and amended the upper age limit for a presidential candidate to 75 years old (previously 70). The
Zine El Abidine Ben Ali candidates were required to get endorsements from 30 political figures. Given the RCD's near-absolute dominance of the political scene, prospective opposition candidates discovered they couldn't get their nomination papers signed. The subsequent years saw the return of several Bourguiba-era restrictions. For many years, the press had been expected to practice self-censorship, but this increasingly gave way to official censorship. Amendments to the press code allowed the Interior Ministry to review all newspaper and magazine articles before publication. In 1992, the president's older brother Habib Ben Ali was tried in absentia in France for laundering the proceeds of drug trafficking, in