(Bloomberg) -- Tunisia’s Prime Minister-designate Elyes Fakhfakh announced his proposed government just a few hours before a midnight deadline, in a last-ditch attempt to end months of political deadlock and pave the way for sorely needed reforms.

Fakhfakh’s picks include former PriceWaterhouseCoopers France associate Nizar Yaiche as finance minister and Noureddine Erray, currently ambassador to Oman, in charge of foreign affairs.

The proposed government lineup reflects “the supremacy of Tunisia’s interests,” Fakhfakh said in a televised address. His team will strive to “unite Tunisians and not pull them apart,” he added.

His apparent bid to strike a note of unity after complicated talks was echoed by the largest party in parliament, the Islamist Ennahda, which urged its lawmakers to support Fakhfakh’s government in a vote later this month.

Read more: Tunisia Strives to Form Cabinet as Threat of New Election Looms

The stakes are high for the ex-finance minister, who’s trying to succeed where his predecessor failed and win enough support for his cabinet. If lawmakers don’t approve his choices in an upcoming vote, then the North African nation will face its second parliamentary election since October, prolonging the political limbo.

Nine years on from its Arab Spring uprising, Tunisia is still struggling to convert its democratic progress into economic gains. In last year’s election, mainstream candidates took a drubbing amid popular outrage over the failure to move the country forward after the ouster of longtime President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.

Delicate Balance

No bloc won enough seats in October’s election to form a government, forcing the biggest party -- moderate Islamist Ennahda -- to attempt to cobble together a coalition, only to see its designated prime minister, independent Habib Jemli, fail to gain approval for his proposed cabinet. That forced President Kais Saied, himself an outsider with no previous political experience, to appoint Fakhfakh to try and bridge the divide.

Tunisia, a rare democracy in the Arab world, has seen nine successive governments since 2011 and has been dogged by lackluster economic growth and a youth unemployment rate that’s roughly double the national average. A series of terrorist attacks in 2015 battered the vital tourism sector, while political bickering and a powerful union’s demands for higher pay hobbled efforts to cut government spending.

To contact the reporters on this story: Souhail Karam in Rabat at skaram10@bloomberg.net;Jihen Laghmari in Cairo at jlaghmari@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Michael Gunn at mgunn14@bloomberg.net, Robert Jameson

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