10 Dinars 2004 Presidential and Legislative Elections, 17th Anniversary of the 7 November Change, Arabic legend

The "7 November Change" refers to the 1987 coup in which Zine El Abidine Ben Ali deposed the aging and increasingly erratic Habib Bourguiba, Tunisia's founding president, by invoking a medical incapacity clause — a bloodless transfer that Ben Ali's government subsequently mythologized into an annual civic occasion. By 2004, commemorating the anniversary had become a predictable instrument of regime self-legitimization, coinciding here with elections that international observers widely criticized as neither free nor competitive. Ben Ali took 94.5% of the vote.