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Libyans have reacted with a mixture of anger and hope after the authorities announced that they had postponed a decisive presidency. elections it was originally scheduled for Friday.
Electoral Commission on Wednesday proposed the vote, which aims to end a decade of chaos in the country, has been postponed for months due to a lack of preparation and disagreement between the various political forces over the legal basis of the poll.
Mohammed al-Wafi, a resident of the capital Tripoli, could not hide his grief, saying the Libyan people were “thirsty” for the election.
“We are refusing to postpone the election. I’m talking about the whole street in Libya. We, as citizens of the south [region]”It simply came to our notice then,” said al-Wafi.
The polling station has proposed postponing the vote until January 24, but given the hostility between the eastern parliament and the Tripoli authorities, it will not be easy to agree on a new date.
2.5 million Libyans collected ballot papers out of a population of seven million.
But the vote has been hampered by a rift between the country’s leadership in the east and west following the NATO-backed uprising that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi, a longtime ruler in 2011.
To begin with, spokesperson Aguila Saleh emphasized this Libya First, vote for the presidency before the parliamentary elections.
Critics say Saleh, who runs the Eastern House of Representatives and is running for president, sees the winning vote as a contest that takes everything.
It is an option that has worried many Tripoli residents, including Ahmed Baiyed, who said the vote could lead to a president whose power would be ambiguous in the absence of a constitution.
“I am glad that the presidential election is not going to happen. There must be a basis for elections. Our foundation is a constitution, ”Baiyed told Al Jazeera.
“If we don’t have a constitution that has a system of government that identifies the powers of a president, how can we vote for a president?”
This is the view shared by Othman al-Amari, who regrets that he has not been able to stand in parliament for many years.
“We have to hold parliamentary elections first and then presidential elections,” he said. “Parliament has been in power for many years and they have done nothing.”
And then there were disagreements over who should run in the election.
The three most prominent candidates – Khalifa Haftar, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi and Abdul Hamid Dbeibah – were the distributors.
Haftar was unacceptable to many in western Libya after the 2019-20 attack on Tripoli, which shattered parts of the capital. Gaddafi, the son of a former ruler, has been tried for war crimes by a Tripoli court, and is the hatred of many who fought in the 2011 uprising.
Interim Prime Minister Dbeibah promised that he would not run in the election when he was appointed. His continued role as prime minister led him to say that many of his rivals had an unfair advantage.
Expectations were shattered
The delay is another setback in Libya’s endless transition, after 42 years of single-man rule and a decade-long civil war.
The period of 1969-2011 was marked by a brutal crackdown on Muammar Gaddafi, but the Libyans took advantage of the generous welfare system paid for by the revenues of Africa’s largest oil reserves.
But Gaddafi was overthrown by a mercenary uprising and turned into a complex war that dragged foreign powers. The country’s infrastructure and economy were constantly degraded, making power cuts and runaway inflation commonplace.
In Tripoli, Dbeibah’s interim government has been working to sign reconstruction contracts and revitalize the city, much to the detriment of Haftar’s 2019-2020 attacks.
Were all these efforts in vain?
Entrepreneur Ibrahim Ali-Bek believes the war could easily erupt again.
If it does, “ordinary citizens will pay the price,” he said.
At the other end of the country in Benghazi, the birthplace of the Gaddafi uprising, residents are facing similar problems.
Engineer Mohamed El-Jadi says he was involved in the uprising for “more freedom and prosperity.”
El-Jadi said he was disappointed with the postponement of the election.
“Our standard of living has fallen, our wages have not changed despite inflation and we live in an unstable environment,” he said.
“The main actors in the conflict, most of whom decided to run in the elections at the time, knew that they had little chance of winning. That’s why they stopped, ”he said.
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