On 21 March, Middle East Eye published an article by Tarek Megerisi and Emadeedin Badi entitled ‘Libyan elections: Has the UN lost the plot?’. In the article, Megerisi and Badi argue that the UN’s recent approach towards resolving Libya’s political challenges is ‘insane’ in that it does not differ from previous approaches and is likely to yield the same results of prolonged destabilisation. They assert that Abdoulaye Bathily’s plan to create ‘a high-level steering panel to guide the country towards elections’ looks similar to the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) that failed in 2021. They argue that Bathily’s diagnosis of Libya’s current strife is correct, namely his recognition of the Libyan people’s frustration with ‘their intransigent political class’, but assert that his plan is ‘mismatched’ to address this. Megerisi and Badi note that Bathily has not made efforts to prevent known ‘crooked’ actors from corrupting the process, which happened with the LPDF. They say that the most likely outcome of Bathily’s plan is for the continued stagnation of Libya’s political arena and the potential for Libya’s civil society to become more stifled.
Read the full article here.