Tunisia was among the first, with large-scale uprisings resulting in the removal of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, who had been in power since 1987 and had ruled with increasingly authoritarian tendencies. He was re-elected again and again, without any real opposition; as well, his ruling party regularly achieved near total domination in the officially released returns.

A total of 26 candidates were on the ballot to replace Beji Caid Essebsi, who was elected president in 2014 with a large turnout of voters eager to exercise that kind of power for the first time. Essebsi, at 92 the oldest leader of a country in the world, died in July. At that time, Mohamed Ennaceur began serving as interim president. He announced that he was not running for president.

Among those running was Moncef Marzouki, who was interim president right after the revolution and had finished second in a runoff to Essebsi in 2014; Abdelkarim Zbidi, who once was the minister of defense; and Abdelfattah Mourou, the founder of the Islamist Ennahda party, which had formed a coalition government along with Essebsi's Nidaa Tounes party. Two female candidates were also on the ballot.

Turnout was expected to be about 35 percent, elections officials said; that figure would be significantly lower than that recorded in 2014. Observers said that no candidate had emerged as a clear front-runner and that a runoff between top vote-getters was expected.

The country had a long history of occupation, which ended with independence from France in 1956. The new nation formed a short-lived constitutional monarchy, which was then replaced a representative government. Ben Ali was prime minister in 1987 when he ousted then-President Habib Bourguiba and took over the government.