Chamber of Deputies (Tunisia) to enter the Chamber of Deputies until 1994. Even then, in the five elections held before the overthrow of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in 2011, they never accounted for more than 19 percent of the total seats in the chamber. During the last few years of Ben Ali's tenure, the chamber took an increased role in debating national policy. However, all legislation still originated with the president, and there was little meaningful opposition to presidential decisions. The 2009 election yielded the following results: Chamber of Deputies (Tunisia) The Chamber of Deputies ( "Majlis an-Nuwwāb", ) was the lower
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