Tunisian president : I'll step down after vote

Supporters of the Islamist Ennahda movement chant slogans Tunisia holds its first-ever free elections Sunday with an Islamic party poised to win, nine months after the surprise toppling of strongman Zine el Abidine Ben Ali that sparked the Arab Spring .
From 7:00 am (0600 GMT), some 7.2 million eligible voters, many of them undecided to the end, can elect a 217-member assembly that will write a new constitution after decades of autocratic government.
The multi-party body will also have the loaded task of appointing an interim president and a caretaker government for the duration of the drafting process, expected to take about a year.
The mother of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young man whose self-immolation last December set off the Tunisian revolt, said the elections were a victory for dignity and freedom.
“Now I am happy that my son’s death has given the chance to get beyond fear and injustice,” Manoubia Bouazizi told Reuters. “I’m an optimist, I wish success for my country.”
Ennahda, banned under Ben Ali who is now in exile in Saudi Arabia, is expected to gain the biggest share of votes. But the Islamist party will probably not win enough to give it a majority in the assembly and will seek to lead a coalition.
The North African country’s elite fear the rise of Ennahda puts their secular values under threat. The Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) has centered its campaign on stopping the Islamists, vowing to seek alliances to keep it out of power.
Ennahda has been at pains to assuage the concerns of secularists and Western powers, fielding several women candidates including one who does not wear the hijab, or Muslim head scarf, and promising not to undermine women’s freedoms.
Tunisia was a pioneer of secular modernization among Arab and Muslim countries in the post-colonial period, banning polygamy, equalizing inheritance rights, giving women the right to vote and discouraging the veil.
Fundamentalist Islamists known as Salafists have attacked a cinema and a TV station in recent months over artistic material deemed blasphemous. Ennahda says they have nothing to do with them, but liberals do not believe them.
Observers say Ennahda’s intentions are not clear. Its election campaign has scrupulously avoided offering policy details that mark it out as much different from its rivals.
At a final election rally on Friday, Suad Abdel-Rahim, the female candidate who does not wear a veil, said Ennahda would protect women’s gains.
But illustrating the party’s contradictions, many of the books on sale on the fringes of the rally were by Salafist writers who believe women should be segregated from men in public and that elections are un-Islamic.
The progressive left, however, remains divided with party leaders having failed to form a pre-vote alliance.
Tunisia's interim president Foued Mebazaa said he would step down after the  election.
"I will recognise the results whoever wins and whatever the colour of the majority (in the future assembly)", Mebazaa told the Arabic language Assabah appearing Sunday.
"I shall hand over power to whoever is chosen by the constituent assembly as the new president of the republic," he said.
Ben Ali was ousted in January in a surprise, leaderless revolt that sparked region-wide pro-democracy uprisings which claimed their latest victim Thursday with the killing of Moamer Kadhafi of Libya, which will declare its official "liberation" Sunday as Tunisians go to the polls.
Unlike its neighbour, which descended into civil war, Tunisia's path to democracy has been mostly peaceful apart from some protests against the pace of transformation and sporadic violent outbursts by conservative Islamists against secularisation.
Elections chief Kamel Jendoubi on Saturday declared his ISIE polling commission "ready and confident", while the European Union observer mission said there was "almost no chance of cheating or falsifying results".
Ennahda had warned of a risk of vote rigging and vowed a fresh uprising if it detected fraud, but its leader Rached Ghannouchi stressed at a final rally Friday that the party would recognise the results "no matter Ennahda's score."
In what is widely regarded as the Arab Spring's first democratic test, Tunisians can choose from more than 11,000 candidates -- half of them women -- representing 80 political parties and several thousand independents.
Vote counting will start as soon as polling stations close at 7:00 pm, with results updated live throughout the night.
The final tally will be released on Monday.