n Tunisia, the ruling coalition has decide to hold Presidential and parliamentary elections on June 23 next year. The new President will be chosen directly by voters.

The move comes in the wake of growing criticism from the opposition that the ruling Ennahada coalition wants to control the government and avoid elections.

The Islamist Ennahda Movement won the country's first free elections last October after the uprising which set in motion the “Arab Spring”. Ennahda leads a government comprising of two secular parties, the Congress for the Republic and the Ettakatol.

The agreement has to be approved by the Constituent Assembly, where the ruling coalition has a majority of the 217 seats.

The Constituent Assembly elected Moncef Marzouki as the President in December 2011 to follow Zine el Abidine, who was ousted as President in January 2011 after weeks of protests.

Those protests inspired the wave of “Arab Spring” uprisings that spread across the Middle East and North Africa.