Liberals sweep Libyan elections

A coalition of liberal parties appeared to win a landslide victory in Libya’s first election since the fall of Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi, breaking the Islamist wave that swept across neighboring Egypt and Tunisia after the Arab Spring. Preliminary results showed that a centrist alliance headed by former interim Prime Minister Mahmoud Jibril won a majority of seats in the country’s new parliament, besting Libya’s branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. “Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt,” said Jibril, a U.S.-educated academic. “We want to build a country without classification and barriers.” Some 1.8 million Libyans—a turnout of nearly 65 percent—voted in the country’s first free elections in 50 years. “We never imagined we would ever be doing this,” said Tripoli resident Aishe Liab.

“It’s fashionable these days to say that NATO’s intervention in Libya left that Arab country no better off,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. But that’s not the way Libyans who “joyously voted” in this election see it. The vote wasn’t perfect: Gunmen stormed several polling stations in the east, and tribal groups in the south tried to sabotage the vote. Yet Libyans “defied the threats.” That’s progress, and it wouldn’t “have been possible without the West’s worthy intervention.”

But Libya is far from being a true democracy, said Paul Pillar in NationalInterest.org. Many people simply voted along family lines, and Jibril won because he’s a member of Libya’s largest tribe. Unless the new government can unite the country’s rival clans, Libya could again explode into violence when the “post-Qaddafi good vibrations” wear off.

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Jibril has major challenges ahead, said Shashank Joshi in The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). He faces tribal warfare in the south, regional grievances in the east, and an unemployment rate of 30 percent. These are big problems for a weak state, even one “flush with oil money.” Still, Libyans always knew the democratic transition would not be easy. And this week, they took “a huge step in the right direction.”