Manama: Tunisia is now home to 94 political parties, up from eight before the uprising that toppled the regime of former president Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali on January 14.
"We are currently looking into 31 more applications for new parties," an interior ministry official said. "We have rejected 118 applications in the past few months," Neji Zouairi told reporters in Tunis on Friday.
Rejections of party applications were attributed to violations of Article Three that prohibits basing a political formation on religion, gender or region or to Article Six which bans the formation of more than one party with identical principles and platforms.
According to the official, the authorities allowed the formation of 158 civil society organisations, taking the total number of the NGOs to 9,724 in a country of around 10 million people.
