Chokri Belaid form a temporary "national unity" government. Belaïd was born in the town of Djebel Jelloud in Tunisia on 26 November 1964. He was a student activist in the 1980s. He worked as a lawyer and was also part of the defence team of former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein during his trial for crimes against humanity. He spoke out against a 2008 clampdown on miners, and was a noted political critic of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the strongman Tunisian leader in office for 23 years, whose 2011 self-exile to Saudi Arabia was the first tangible result of the Arab Spring
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