Saddam Haftar Wants to Inherit Libya Like a Family Farm

Libya has not elected a president since the 2011 uprising that ended Muammar Gaddafi's forty-two years in power. Libyans have not voted in a national election since the 2021 attempt collapsed in confusion. And now a man who has never stood before a ballot box is trying to walk into the presidential palace on a red carpet of backroom bargains, paid for with the sea that belongs to all of us.

Ask yourself what a presidency is worth when it is handed down rather than won. Ask who it answers to. Saddam Haftar, son of the eastern military commander Khalifa Haftar, is answering those questions in the only way his family has ever known: through force, patronage, and a parliament that bends when it is told to.

On October 20, the House of Representatives in Benghazi ratified a maritime memorandum that Turkey signed in November 2019 with the Tripoli-based government. For nearly seven years, eastern Libya denounced that document as illegitimate. Then, within days, it was approved. The European Union condemned the vote. So did Greece, Egypt, and Israel. Those were not idle objections. The memorandum redraws maritime boundaries across waters that Greece, Cyprus, and Egypt claim as their exclusive economic zones, and it hands Ankara a legal wedge in the eastern Mediterranean.

The ratification did not happen because Libyans debated it. It happened because the speaker standing in the way was removed. A fortnight before the vote, the House ousted Aguila Saleh, who had led the chamber for twelve years. Saleh was Cairo's principal ally in the east. He was also the one figure with the constitutional standing and tribal weight to complicate any transfer of power inside the Haftar household. Remove him, and you clear the road for both a maritime deal and a dynastic handover. His replacement, Al-Salhin Abdulnabi, is a fellow member of the Obeidat tribe who chaired the chamber's Libyan-Turkish friendship committee. The message to every legislator in Benghazi could not be plainer: this parliament now takes its orders from the Haftars and from Ankara.

Here is what Libyans are being asked to accept. A chamber that cannot be trusted to represent them has signed away a claim to their own maritime space. A military family that has fought for control of the capital since 2019 is preparing to convert that control into a title. And a foreign government is being paid, in sovereignty, for its support.

We have seen this script before across our continent. A strongman dismantles the institutions that might check him, presents himself as the only stable option, and then tells the people that elections are a luxury they cannot afford. Libya's own history should have ended this charade long ago. Khalifa Haftar launched his assault on Tripoli in April 2019 promising to rid the country of militias. Turkish drones and Syrian fighters helped halt that offensive at the gates of the capital in 2020, and his forces retreated in disorder. The memorandum that Ankara extracted from Tripoli was the price of that rescue. Now the son wants to ride it into power.

Follow the money and the patrons, and the picture sharpens. Massad Boulos, the Trump administration's senior adviser for Arab and African affairs, is championing a power-sharing arrangement between Tripoli and Benghazi that could install Saddam as president. Saddam is reportedly counting on Washington's transactional appetite for a deal, sharpened by lobbying from Ankara and Abu Dhabi and by Recep Tayyip Erdogan's rapport with Donald Trump. Turkey wants the maritime settlement in its favour. The United Arab Emirates wants a loyal client at the top of the Libyan state. Egypt wants its maritime rights protected, and it has its own candidate in reserve: Saddam's brother Khaled, the chief of staff of the Libyan Arab Armed Forces. Every foreign capital in this story is bidding for Libya. Not one of them has asked a Libyan voter what he thinks.

Europe's role is its own shame. When Benghazi expelled the European Union's migration commissioner and three member-state ministers in July 2025, European capitals answered with something closer to grovelling than resolve. Less than a year later, Athens hosted Saddam Haftar, who sidestepped any commitment to an alternative maritime memorandum. Brussels has reduced its Libya policy to counting boats leaving the eastern coast for Crete. A Union that begs Saddam to police the waters now under dispute has no leverage to make him respect them.

Consider what Libyans have had to endure while their future is auctioned. Successive governments have failed to pay public salaries on time, electricity has been cut in the heat of summer, and armed groups have fought over Tripoli's streets. Young Libyans who want to build businesses or universities find that the people in charge of the state are the same men who have treated the state as spoils. A country with immense oil wealth and a young, educated population has been held hostage by a permanent war economy. That is not the fault of ordinary Libyans. It is the fault of those who have made the war profitable.

So what must change? The answer begins with a principle that Libya's neighbours, its partners, and its own elites have spent a decade trying to avoid: the Libyan people must choose their leader in a free and credible election. Not a negotiated succession. Not a power-sharing cartel dressed up as reconciliation. A vote, held under a transparent electoral law, supervised by an independent electoral commission, with candidates subject to scrutiny of their records and the courts able to rule on disputes.

Libya is not without models. Across the continent, there are countries that have shown that accountable government and economic growth can coexist. Botswana built one of Africa's most durable democracies on competitive elections, a professional civil service, and a judiciary that rules against the powerful. Mauritius has maintained peaceful alternation of power and strong property rights for decades. Senegal, in 2024, demonstrated that an electorate can reject an entrenched order at the ballot box and that its institutions can carry the transition. These nations did not become stable because a single family monopolised the state. They became stable because the rules applied to everyone, including the men with guns.

For Libya, the immediate steps are clear. The Libyan Presidential Council and the House of Representatives should reinstate a credible electoral timetable and publish a binding roadmap. The United Nations Support Mission in Libya should insist that any power-sharing arrangement be subject to a national vote within a fixed period, not endorsed through a closed-door deal in Washington. Parliaments should not ratify international agreements that touch the country's maritime boundaries without open committee hearings and public legal review. Civil society organisations, business associations, and the judiciary must be protected so that they can speak without fear of reprisal. And the private sector, which has every reason to want contract security and predictable regulation, should make clear that it will not invest in a country where property and law depend on the mood of a single family.

Our continent's partners have a role to play too. The European Union should stop treating Libya as a migration waystation and start treating it as a sovereign state whose citizens deserve a legitimate government. Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Russia, each with their own stake, should be told plainly that backing a dynasty is not the same as backing stability. Washington, which claims to champion democracy and the rule of law, should be asked the question it so often avoids: does a deal that replaces a contested war with an unelected presidency serve Libyans, or only the men who can deliver it?

Here is the call. Libyans in Tripoli, Benghazi, Sabha, and the diaspora must refuse to be spectators to their own succession. Demand a date for national elections and refuse any arrangement that postpones the people's voice again. Demand that every candidate for the presidency publish their finances, explain their militia ties, and face public questioning. Demand that the parliament that ratified a sovereignty-sensitive treaty explain its vote to the people who elected it, if they were ever allowed to elect anyone. And across Africa, citizens and journalists should keep this story alive, because a dynasty that survives its own scandals is one that learns it can take anything.

History in Libya has a dark sense of humour. The memorandum that sealed the defeat of Khalifa Haftar may now become the foundation of his family's power. But history also offers a verdict that has not yet been written. Should Libyans be given the chance to vote, the Haftars will have to win a contest rather than inherit a throne. And if they cannot, then the sea, the state, and the future belong to the people who have been waiting too long to claim them.

Based on reporting by ALJAZEERA