Political and Constitutional Transitions in North Africa: Actors and Factors by Justin Frosini & Francesco Biagi

Author:Justin Frosini & Francesco Biagi [Frosini, Justin & Biagi, Francesco]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, American Government, General, Social Science, Regional Studies
ISBN: 9781138816381
Google: U0HHoAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 22776084
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-12-09T00:00:00+00:00

The fractious politics of the post-revolutionary phase74

The handover of power from the unelected NTC to an elected institution marked the opening salvo of Libya’s experiment in representative democracy. Elections for Libya’s legislative body, the General National Congress (GNC), held in July 2012, were widely considered free and fair. They yielded a body in which 80 seats were allocated to political parties while 120 went to independent candidates. Two political forces, Mahmoud Jibril’s National Forces Alliance (NFA) and the Muslim Brotherhood’s Justice and Construction Party (JCP), dominated competition for the party list seats with the NFA coming out on top with a plurality (39 out of 80) of seats.

International media hailed the NFA’s electoral victory as a surprising success by liberal secularist forces, but that was a misleading conclusion. As Mahmoud Jibril himself reiterated many times, the NFA coalition is neither liberal nor secular, but rather nationalist and non-ideological. Moreover, the 120 candidates who won independent seats did not initially align themselves with either of the two main groups, opting instead to support either of the two groups on an issue-by-issue basis.

In the end, the July 2012 elections produced a strong (but not dominant) non-Islamist faction led by the NFA, and a statistically weaker (but more cohesive) and ideologically motivated Islamist opposition led by the JCP. Given this ideological polarization and the fragmentation of independent members and smaller parties, no majority coalition was formed. Thus, early into the GNC’s tenure, Libyan politics moved behind the curtain and politicking became increasingly opaque.

The results of the July 2012 GNC elections and somewhat misguided media coverage obscured the relative strengths of the parties involved. Jibril’s NFA obtained an admittedly impressive 39 of the 80 seats available to party lists, while the Muslim Brotherhood’s JCP came in a distant second with only 19. This led many commentators to proclaim a liberal victory in the elections. However, this hasty assessment ignored the fact that it was unclear how the remaining 120 independents would align themselves, and whether the loosely connected NFA members would follow Jibril’s marching orders or pursue different agendas.

A noteworthy opinion poll conducted by the Libyan Center for Research and Development just after the elections found that 81 percent of those who voted for NFA did so because it was headed by Mahmoud Jibril. Among the primary reasons for his selection, voters noted the absence of prominent leaders from other political movements that could compete with him, or match his experience and qualifications. Votes for Jibril and, by extension, the NFA were based less on the nuance of his ideology or party platform and more on the perceived competency of his leadership. Hasty media analysis proclaiming a liberal sweep made incorrect assumptions about voters’ intentions. Moreover, Jibril himself often noted that his party was neither secular nor liberal, but rather on ideological and nationalist. He stressed the fact that everybody in Libya is Muslim, and the words “secular” and “liberal” are understood to be incompatible with Islam.

As it turned out, the NFA was unable

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