Libya’s messy election

Libya On your marks, get set, now what?

B ENGHAZI AND TRIPOLI Libya’s first presidential election was meant to unite the country. It is not going as planned

For weekend relief in wartorn Libya, there is little better entertainment than tween east and west, each with its own government. Foreign powers piled in: Turcheering the Arabian steeds at the racetrack in Tripoli, the capital. The competitors can be a stubborn bunch. It often takes six men to bundle a horse into its starting box. They place a sack over its head and yank it forwards with a leather belt strapped around its rump. The horses frequently rear up and dislodge the jockeys.

Staging Libya’s first race for president is proving far messier. There is no commonly accepted legal framework for the election, scheduled for December 24th. Candidates have been disqualified, then readmitted. The un official who was supposed to help oversee the process, Jan Kubis, resigned in November. With the vote likely to be postponed, warlords are flexing their muscles. On December 15th militias briefly surrounded government offices in Tripoli.

The election was meant to pull Libya out of a decade of chaos that began when rebels, with the help of nato, overthrew and killed the country’s ageing dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, in 2011. A disputed election in 2014 triggered a civil war bekey in the west and France, Russia and the United Arab Emirates in the east. The un tried to establish a “unity” government in 2015, but it did not have widespread support. In 2019 Khalifa Haftar, the strongman in the east, launched a siege of Tripoli that lasted 14 months. General Haftar’s foray failed, thanks in large part to Turkey’s intervention. The un then initiated a new political process that led to a ceasefire in late 2020 and an interim government, agreed on by both sides, in February. The presidential election was meant to crown this progress. A large portion of the public registered to vote. But an election law pushed through by the speaker of the parliament based in the east, Aguila Saleh, who is also a presidential candidate, has been rejected by other factions. There has been little conventional campaigning, but armed groups are reportedly trying to strongarm voters.

Even if the election goes ahead, few Libyans imagine it will mark a break with the past. One of the most popular candidates is Seif alIslam Qaddafi, a son of the late dictator. When he emerged from his hideout in Zintan, southwest of Tripoli, to announce his candidacy, he wore a brown tunic like his father used to. Many Libyans are too young to remember the late Qaddafi’s brutality. Others appreciate the relative stability of that era, during the latter part of which Seif acted as a sort of prime minister. His followers believe Libya’s economy and infrastructure would be stronger had the rebellion never happened. They are not moved by the International Criminal Court’s indictment of Seif for torturing and killing civilians and rebels in 2011.

If Seif represents the Qaddafi era, General Haftar, also a candidate, represents the period that followed. He tried to seize control of the rebellion and proclaimed himself commander of Libya’s army after it. His men fired the first shots in the subsequent civil war, after a largely Islamist administration refused to hold new elections when its mandate expired in 2014. Like Seif, he is accused of war crimes. From his base near Benghazi, Libya’s second city (which he smashed during the war), he lords it over the east—and much of the south and west. He has spurned repeated offers to join Libya’s interim governments, spoiled past efforts to unite the country and has no eco

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