Tunisia's main secular party won 85 of 217 seats in Sunday's vote, and the Islamist Ennahda came in second, with 69, the national election body announced at a press conference early Thursday. Nida Tunis, now well-placed for presidential elections in November, had presented itself as the answer to the moderate Islamists of Ennahda, who had struggled to guide the country through the turmoil that followed the 2011 uprising against the autocrat Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in a coalition with two left-wing factions.

"I promise only one thing and that is to re-establish the state," Beji Caid Essebsi, the 87-year-old former foreign minister and founder of Nida Tunis, said in an interview on national TV late Monday, days before the release of official results, but also after it had become clear that his party had won the most seats. "All our problems resulted from the lack of a state."

Though voters had more than 100 parties to choose from, the contest had always come down to Nida Tunis and Ennahda. Commentators have speculated that Tunisia's otherwise well-organized Islamists had paid the price for their turbulent years of power after the Arab Spring, which saw the rise of terrorist groups in the North African nation.

This time around, voters reportedly sought security and stability with familiar faces from Tunisia's more authoritarian past, but the Islamists' weight in the new parliament will make them a player in any future government. With the next-highest vote-getters polling just around 5 percent, putting together a governing coalition without the Islamists - as Nida Tunis has repeatedly promised to do - could prove quite the feat. In his concession speech on Monday, the Ennahda chief promised to work with the new government.

"The whole Arab world wishes they were Tunisian, so enjoy all these freedoms," Ennahda founder Rashed Ghannouchi told a crowd who chanted his name, calling the elections a "victory for all Tunisians."

mkg/av (Reuters, AFP, AP)