After several days of false suspense, the Libyan authorities confirmed on Wednesday that the presidential election scheduled for Friday would not take place, the Election Authority proposing to postpone by one month this crucial deadline in the transition process supposed to leave this country from Post-Gaddafi chaos North Africa.
Less than 48 hours before D-Day, a parliamentary committee responsible for monitoring the ballot concluded that it was “impossible” to hold it on the scheduled date, which had been set more than a year ago.
Its conclusions were made public after an announcement of the postponement of the poll had been awaited for several days, against the backdrop of insurmountable disagreements between rival camps over an election that was to be contested by several divisive candidates, with authoritarian inclinations, or suspected of corruption. .
This setback plunges Libya, the theater of two civil wars since 2011. Without a “way forward”, there is a risk of “localized conflicts which could spread to other parts of the country”, says warning Amanda Kadlec, former member of the UN group of experts on Libya, interviewed by AFP.
Since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, Libya has failed to extricate itself from a decade of chaos, marked in recent years by the existence of rival powers in the east and west of the country and by a series of armed conflict. The December 24 election was to mark the culmination of a UN-sponsored political process to end this chapter of divisions and instability.
“Long quarrels”
The Libyan High Electoral Commission (HNEC) rebounded on the parliamentary report concluding that it was impossible to hold the poll on Friday to propose to postpone it for one month, to January 24, 2022.
After the ceasefire signed in October 2020 between camps in the East and the West, a new unified government was set up at the beginning of the year, at the end of a laborious process overseen by the ‘UN, to manage the transition to the elections.
If the postponement of the poll had been in no doubt for several days, no institution seemed to want to take the responsibility of formalizing such a postponement, the HNEC and the Parliament based in Tobruk (East), in conflict, considering each that it was up to the other to do so.
By proposing a new date, the HNEC “seeks to put the responsibility in the hands of the Parliament […], which must endorse the new date, but it is unlikely that it will, ”said Wolfram Lacher, an expert on Libya at the German SWP Institute.
From now on, we can expect “long disputes over the date of the new elections,” researcher Hamish Kinnear of the Verisk Maplecroft institute told AFP.
“The international community was united on the need to hold elections on December 24, and most Libyan political actors had pledged to respect this date. The problem is that no one could agree on the constitutional basis of the elections, ”he recalls.
The scenario of a postponement has been emerging for weeks, the ingredients likely to transform the historic deadline into a fiasco multiplying: a contested electoral law, a modified calendar to postpone the legislative elections and controversial figures declaring themselves candidates.
Insecurity
The electoral process was also peppered with serious incidents: armed men blocked access to the Sebha court (South) to prevent the lawyers of Seif al-Islam Gadhafi, younger son of the former dictator Muammar Gaddafi, from appeal the rejection of his presidential candidacy.
The problem is that no one could agree on the constitutional basis of the elections.
On Tuesday, armed militiamen were deployed in Tripoli, raising fears of a resumption of violence as a postponement of the election loomed.
The US envoy for Libya and ambassador to Tripoli called for “calm” on Wednesday and “measures likely to ease the tense security situation in Tripoli and elsewhere in Libya”.
France remains “attached to the smooth running of the electoral process until its end”, reacted the spokesperson of the French government, Gabriel Attal, while the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Annalena Baerbock, declared “to work in close collaboration with the United Nations […] so that this election can take place, because it is of capital importance ”.
In addition to Gaddafi’s son, the main figures who ran for president are Marshal Khalifa Haftar, a strongman from the East, and the current Prime Minister, Abdel Hamid Dbeibah.