The president of the High Council of State (HCE), Libyan upper house based in Tripoli (west), defended on Saturday, February 12 the appointment by the Parliament sitting in the East of a new prime minister, in the midst of institutional chaos.
The text accompanying the vote of confidence granted last March to the government of Abdelhamid Dbeibah “stipulated that his mandate would end no later than December 24, 2021″, first recalled Khaled El-Mechri. The appointment Thursday of the influential ex-Minister of the Interior Fathi Bachagha to replace Abdelhamid Dbeibah stems from this same text, after a rare ” consensus between Parliament and HCE “, he continued in a television statement.
This cacique from the West accuses the government of “fueling a campaign against Parliament and the HCE “, marking its distance from the executive authority of Tripoli and transcending the traditional East-West divides. On Saturday, armed groups converged on Tripoli from Misrata, some 200 km away, to support Abdelhamid Dbeibah who refuses to hand over power, raising fears of a resurgence of armed conflict, according to a photographer from the AFP.
After years of war, he had been appointed head of an interim government, under the aegis of the UN, to lead the country to a presidential election supposed to complete the transition initiated after the death of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011. However, the persistence of differences, particularly on its legal basis, led to an indefinite postponement of the election initially scheduled for December. Parliament believes that the executive’s mandate expired with this postponement, while Abdelhamid Dbeibah assures that he will only cede power to an elected government.
Libya finds itself with two Prime Ministers, an institutional imbroglio which is not new since the country had already been ruled between 2014 and 2016 by two rival Prime Ministers based in the East and the West. This time, it is no longer an East-West conflict, but an arrangement between key players in the two regions. Fathi Bachagha is not from the East, but from Misrata in the West, just like Abdelhamid Dbeibah. In December, as a postponement of the election loomed, the presidential candidate moved closer to the rival camp by traveling to Benghazi, where he met Marshal Khalifa Haftar, a strongman from the East, in the name of national reconciliation.
Two years earlier, then Minister of the Interior, Fathi Bachagha was on the front line to repel the offensive of the septuagenarian soldier against Tripoli. On Thursday, Haftar’s army welcomed the designation of his former enemy, who has twelve days to submit a government to Parliament.
