News & Events

The U.N. special envoy for Libya warned the country’s feuding political actors Thursday that if they don’t urgently form a unified government and move toward elections the oil-rich North African nation will slide into “disintegration.”

The Head of the High Council of State, Mohammed Takala, says that the parallel government does not have international support, and the House of Representatives effectively ended its existence when it dismissed its former PM, Fathi Bashagha, and brought in another PM in his place.

Former UN envoy to Libya Ghassan Salame believes the repeatedly postponed elections are “not important as long as the state functions normally.”

Efforts to bring together Libya’s rival factions to hold an election have been the main focus of diplomacy for years, but there has been little progress towards a vote since a 2020 ceasefire.

The Speaker of the Libyan House of Representatives, Aqila Saleh, met with the UN envoy to Libya, Abdoulaye Bathily, on Sunday to discuss the holding of presidential and parliamentary elections and the formation of a unified government.

As Moscow tightens its grip on the eastern regions of Libya, it has triggered new geopolitical tremors within the wider North Africa region, parts of the Mediterranean and even further west, across the Atlantic.

The President of Libya’s High Council of State and the Speaker of the House of Representatives in Tobruk agreed Wednesday to continue consultations on the country’s political crisis.

The United Nations Support Mission in Libya said on Thursday that it had completed an initial technical review of the “Presidential Election Law no. 28/2023 and Parliamentary Election Law no. 27/2023”, which were received from the Speaker of the House of Representatives on 5 October.