The international community must ensure a clear and workable election process if Libya is to achieve stability, argue Tim Eaton and Tarek Megerisi
On December 24, 2021, Libyans are due to vote in elections that seek to provide a unified, legitimate, national government for Libya for the first time since 2014. Yet, a myopic focus on creating a new government obscures the fact that the measure of success should not be that government’s mere existence, but rather what it can achieve.
The government will be elected on a contested basis but there is little clarity over how the roles and responsibilities of key positions in the process will operate. We have seen how this plays out before.
In 2014, a second bout of civil war followed parliamentary elections as rival governments emerged. If this latest poll is to be a success, the ambiguities of the election process must be clarified. In the longer term, means to initiate national reconciliation and address sources of conflict within the economic and security sectors must be established to make any gains sustainable.
It seems that all Libyans and the international community are united behind elections. Yet, a zero-sum competition for power continues
At first glance, it seems that all Libyans and the international community are united behind elections. Yet, despite the pro-election statements, a zero-sum competition for power continues. The fight is now over the electoral process for whoever controls what happens next. Those in positions of power see the elections as an opportunity for advancement or self-renewal but place a priority on protecting their current position should the process collapse.
Abdul Hamid Dabaiba, the prime minister of the Government of National Unity, has been arguing that ‘stabilization’ must precede elections. Should the election falter, then his framework for stabilizing Libya will become the default – and perhaps only – policy option in play.
Dabaiba has courted support through the rollout of populist policies, such as handing out 40,000 dinar ($9,000) grants to newly married couples and kickstarting reconstruction through his ‘Reviving Life’ project. Yet, the tendering of these contracts has raised eyebrows given the Dabaiba’s family history of enrichment while in charge of Libyan state institutions. Critics claim these projects are little more than a series of payoffs, using public funds to obtain political support.
Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, who demolished 2019’s political process by marching his troops on Tripoli, has spent most of the year trying to ensure he can run for office while guarding his independence by preventing political or military unification in Libya. There is little prospect that candidates standing in areas under Haftar’s control could meaningfully challenge him, and there is no realistic way of ensuring the polls are free and fair. Should the elections fail, or if Haftar performs poorly, he will no doubt return to barracks and dispute the victor’s authority. This is highly likely as it is difficult to see how he will obtain the necessary votes to get over the line in the more populous west of the country that he spent two years attacking.
Aguila Saleh, Speaker of the chronically divided Libyan parliament, has capitalized on international desperation for the election to ride roughshod over due process. While seen as a competitor to Haftar, Saleh has done much to facilitate Haftar’s candidacy, whose attack on Tripoli he supported. Having blocked any progress on the substantive side of elections – the constitutional basis and electoral law – until the autumn, Saleh then unilaterally drafted and passed election ‘laws’, that are more accurately described as decrees. These decrees transformed Libya into a presidential system, with an ill-drafted constitutional basis that creates an executive of largely unchecked power and would delay a vote on a new parliament until at least a month after presidential elections.
While Saleh is known to have aspirations of being elected president, it is difficult to see how he could overtake Haftar let alone win votes outside of his eastern constituency. His calculation seems to be that either political rivals across Libya will object to a vote or that the process will not deliver a result. Either of these outcomes would allow Saleh to stay on and grow his power.
To further complicate matters, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the heir apparent of his late father, threw his hat into the ring. Saif’s prospects of winning are highly limited owing to the fragmented nature of the so-called Greens. But his re-emergence poses a further challenge to Haftar as they compete for the support of the same constituencies, and it has sparked rage among pro-revolutionary groups.
Perhaps most important at this stage is the question of who will be able to run. This issue is becoming more hotly contested by the day. Saif’s candidacy has now been rejected due to a prior in absentia conviction, while the court is currently considering appeals for Dabaiba’s expulsion. Exclusions are subject to appeal, and whichever way they fall the decisions have major ripple effects. Less than a month from the polls, the electoral process is at breaking point.
Rebooting the peace process
The current political process was built on the rubble of previous United Nations’ efforts that collapsed as Haftar marched on Tripoli. By the summer of 2020, Turkey had stopped Tripoli falling to Haftar’s international coalition only for Russia to re-enforce Libya’s division by imposing a new front line in the central city of Sirte.
Russia worked with Egypt to piece together a new eastern Libyan political entity through which they could channel their interests. Egypt then appealed to the United States and France to recreate the failed peace process between western and eastern Libyan factions who represented international interests yet lacked support within Libya.
The international community was gridlocked, and so turned back to the UN to resolve the situation. With limited room to operate and with an inappropriate format for peace-making imposed on them, the UN worked to try and formalize peace and restart Libya’s political realignment afresh.
An old format of a joint military council was brought together to forge a ceasefire, while elections were resurrected to generate a legitimate leader to bring about change.
In the event, the military council was a body of delegates with no leading military members taking part. In addition, it focused on lofty goals, such as the removal of foreign forces from Libya, rather than any security sector reform, unification or accountability measures that would have made the resumption of conflict within Libya less easy.
Similarly, the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum convened by the UN to create a strategy for political change, became a hollow forum of delegates. Despite its initial conception as a means to displace what Stephanie Williams, the then acting UN Special representative, dismissed as ‘Libya’s political dinosaurs’, the opportunity for bringing together individuals who could garner popular legitimacy to reconcile, reform and finally resolve Libya’s 10-year transition was missed.
The UN calculated that including members of the opposing parliament and consultative body that had presided over Libya’s political split in 2014 was necessary for progress, but lax follow-up and oversight of the process by Jan Kubis, the incoming UN Special Envoy who has since resigned , allowed the dinosaurs to dominate. The elements of the forum that the UN had originally sought to empower were marginalized. This meant that the Military Commission and the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum, the two vehicles for driving Libya’s change, were dependent on those who benefited most from Libya remaining the same.
Even if the polls do proceed, a blind eye has been turned to destabilizing interference from external actors
The forceful insistence by Richard Norland, the US Special Envoy for Libya, to hold elections by any means necessary and his support from France and Egypt – both of whom have long intervened in Libya to support the return of military authoritarianism – did suggest that the elections would take place, but legal wranglings over the process now threaten to derail it.
Even if the polls do proceed, there has been little content to the international consensus on the need for elections. The need to show progress towards that goal has meant a blind eye has been turned to destabilizing interference from external actors in any forum that mattered.
Where do we go from here?
As Libya heads towards elections, it is apparent that a focus on ensuring the elections happen without the accompanying conditions to make polls meaningful has been a mistake. The international community’s lack of willingness to steward the process has allowed a transfer of power from the architects of the strategy and neutral international sponsors to parties involved in the conflict. This has placed the arsonists in charge of putting out the fire.
Despite their clear procedural violations, Saleh’s decrees were effectively rubber stamped by the UN Special Envoy who presented them to the Security Council as electoral laws that would serve as the basis for elections. Since then, Libya’s electoral commission has come under international pressure to conduct the polls based on Saleh’s unilateral decrees.
Given the level of fragmentation within Libya, a decisive result in the upcoming election is unlikely
As a result, it is legitimate to ask what the planned elections might actually change. Given the level of fragmentation within Libya, a decisive result is unlikely. There is little time for new entrants on the political scene to make an impact and such is the level of disagreement over the parameters of the process itself that it will be easy for Libyan rivals to disavow the results.
Given the international community’s commitment to delivering elections, it must now seek to do all it can to rescue the process it started. At the very least, open questions over the sequencing of the poll, the transfer of power and clarifications over roles and responsibilities of key posts must be clarified before December 24. Finally, the international community must press Libyan candidates to agree publicly to accept the result of the polls, win or lose. If these minimum requirements are not met, then the electoral process will be a road to nowhere.
Looking beyond December 24, it must be noted that an electoral process is not a substitute for negotiation over the substantive issues that have driven the conflict.
A programme for ending Libya’s troubles must rely on a broader process of milestones for progress on key issues such as the reunification of institutions, economic and governance reform, security sector reform, reconciliation and transitional justice.
Elections form an important part of such a process but are not the sole element. This also involves accepting that a new government will not address all of these divisive challenges without considered assistance from the international community. The lessons of other post-conflict states such as Lebanon and Iraq clearly indicate it will not.
These deeper questions may be side-lined as the focus on elections narrows but they will not go away. Worryingly, there is no indication that Europe, the US or the UN are ready to deal with them once elections in Libya have been held.
Tim Eaton – Senior Research Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Programme
Tarek Megerisi – Senior Policy Fellow, North Africa and Middle East Programme, European Council on Foreign Relations