Algeria's President calls for elections in Libya

North Africa has its focus on Libya. The African country has been in conflict for more than nine years since Gaddafi's death in 2011 and the outbreak of civil war in 2014.  

The warring parties have now sat down to talk and agree on a lasting peace, and many are recommending measures to improve the situation. In this case, the president of Algeria, Abdelmadjid Tebboune, has explained that “it is important to hold elections in the country, regardless of the obstacles on the ground,” he added.

Libya currently has two governments: the GNA, led by Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj, and the eastern parliament of Tobruk, established in 2014 and associated with the Libyan National Army (LNA) commanded by Marshal Khalifa Haftar. 

At the beginning of September both reached an agreement on the need to reach "major commitments" to end the conflict in Libya, as they announced after the first contact in Bouznika, Morocco. 

Tebboune stresses that the only way to rebuild Libya is by organising elections. The president compared the Libyan case to that of a collapsed body, which doctors are seeking to vaccinate with aspirin to save it, but it is too late. 

The metaphor tries to show that vaccines are no longer useful. Tebboune has stressed that the only way to rebuild Libya is through popular legitimacy by organising elections. "It is not possible to reunify institutions without agreeing on a legitimate person elected by all the Libyan people," the neighbouring president stressed. 

There are still no names on the table to start an election campaign. It will be a long process in which the two opposing parties will have to agree. Libya's civil war has been raging since 2014 and has become an international war scenario involving different foreign powers with different interests on the ground.  

Haftar's LNA is supported by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Russia and France; meanwhile, the GNA receives military support from Turkey and financial support from Qatar, and has been recognised by the United Nations (UN) since 2016. 

All these actors must take a step aside so that the Libyans can dialogue without pressure and thus, as Tebboune explains and insists on, be able to hold elections and start from scratch.