Libyan authority fears landslide victory of Saif Gaddafi, December 2021 election may be postponed

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With the sharp possibility of Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif al Islam Gaddafi, Libyan authority are thinking of postponing the December 2021 election in the country and not take the risk of holding any election in the nearest future. Meanwhile, Libya’s foreign minister Najla al-Mangoush has indicated that the general election set for December this year may be postponed if “Parliament continues to delay the ratification on an electoral law. It may be mentioned here that, Muammar Gaddafi’s son Saif al Islam Gaddafi has earlier told The New York Times that he will contest in the December 2021 general elections, and according to analysts Libyans being extremely frustrated with post-Gaddafi governments and downfall of Libya’s economy with alarming rise of militancy may give a landslide victory to Saif al Islam Gaddafi and his party.

The development comes a day after UN envoy to Libya, Jan Kubis, said time was running short for Libyans to finalize a legal framework for elections to be held on time.

Early August talks in Geneva had exposed deep divisions over when to hold elections, what elections to hold, and on what constitutional grounds.

“As a government, we have put in place everything required to move towards elections, providing financial, logistical and material support to the elections commission,” Foreign Minister Najla al-Mangoush told a news conference in the Algerian capital Algiers after meeting with Algerian officials.

“I cannot answer whether the elections will be postponed or not, but we are trying to ensure they will be held on the scheduled date” of December 24.

But “we are still waiting to see if Parliament will approve the electoral law… This could block or postpone the election,” she added.

The minister also said there would be a “consultative meeting” of neighboring countries and “friendly states” in late September or early October, with the security of the polls high on the agenda.

The two-day meeting in Algiers, attended by the foreign ministers of Egypt, Tunisia, Sudan, Chad and Niger, also addressed the security vacuum that the conflict in Libya created in the region.

The UN estimates as many as 20,000 foreign fighters are in Libya.

“So far, we don’t know where these illegal forces present in Libya will go.

The most reasonable thing would be for those who brought these people into Libya to send them back out of Libya, to the places they came from,” Algeria’s Foreign Minister Ramtane Lamamra said.

“This is the way for us [Algeria] and the neighboring countries to avoid also becoming victims of an unorganized and unsupervised withdrawal of those groups”.

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