“The Libyan people have voted twice in free and fair elections for the kind of leadership they want.”
— Hillary Clinton on Thursday, November 19th, 2015 in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations
After a recent foreign policy speech, Hillary Clinton was asked about the success of democratization in Libya, a country ruled for decades by dictator Muammar Gaddafi.
“The Libyan people have voted twice in free and fair elections for the kind of leadership they want,” Clinton said in the Nov. 19, 2015, speech. “They have not been able to figure out how to prevent the disruptions that they are confronted with because of internal divides and because of some of the external pressures that are coming from terrorist groups and others. So I think it’s too soon to tell, and I think it’s something that we have to be, you know, looking at very closely.”
We wondered whether Clinton was correct to say that “the Libyan people have voted twice in free and fair elections for the kind of leadership they want,” so we took a closer look.
“Libya has no leadership at all at the moment,” said Amanda Kadlec, a project associate in defense and political sciences at the RAND Corp. who specializes in Libya. “Even though two governments — one based in Tripoli and the other in Tobruk — are competing for power, it is essentially a non-governed state, because the mandate of the most recent elected government expired at the end of October this year.”
There have been three major elections held in Libya since the fall of Gaddafi — parliamentary elections in July 2012, elections for the constitutional drafting assembly in February 2014, and parliamentary elections in June 2014. Each received at least some praise from outside observers for integrity of the balloting process, but each, to one degree or another, also faced problems.
Here’s a brief rundown:
• Parliamentary election, July 2012. This election, which took place in something of a honeymoon between Gaddafi’s fall and the emergence of armed fighting, offers the strongest support for Clinton’s claim that free and fair elections have been held in Libya.
The Carter Center — an organization founded by former President Jimmy Carter that offers election assistance to newly democratizing countries — released a post-election report in May 2013 that found Libya’s first national vote to be “a major step forward in the country’s transition from authoritarian rule to participatory democracy.”
“Despite overwhelming challenges,” the center wrote, “Libyan authorities organized the election in a timely, orderly, and impartial manner that offered Libyans a historic opportunity to exercise their franchise.” The report described most of the country as “peaceful and jubilant” on election day, with about 62 percent turnout among registered voters.
And Kadlec of RAND suggested that this vote was a step forward, albeit a small one.
“In theory, Libyans expressed their genuine desire for a democratic Libya by voting in elections,” she said. “But after generations under a completely closed dictatorship, Libyans who had never been exiles had little to no frame of reference as to how elections would translate into an effective form of governance.”
• Constitutional drafting assembly election, February 2014. By the time of the next election, a year and half later, the “jubilance” had begun to fade and problems increased.
The Carter Center, which observed this election as well, found it “soundly administered” but added that it “failed to achieve the desired inclusiveness to have a truly representative body.”
“The low levels of participation and the general fatigue with the country’s political road map may well be an indication that Libya’s political institutions remain in danger of being hollowed out — valued more by the people for what they can deliver in patronage than as real institutions through which the country’s political future can be charted,” the report concluded.
• Parliamentary elections, June 2014. The problems that emerged in the February 2014 vote continued to plague the vote four months later.
In addition to low turnout security problems had become a distinct problem. In Benghazi, Islamist insurgents opened fire on a local security headquarters, killing at least five and wounding at least 30, according to the BBC.
In another incident in the same city, gunmen assassinated human rights activist Salwa Bughaighis as she returned home from voting. Polling places in cities such as Derna, Kufra and Sabra were closed for security reasons.
In addition, the vote itself proved not to have a lasting positive impact. While the results amounted to “a devastating defeat for the Islamists” — as Mohamed Eljarh, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center, wrote at the time — Libya’s highest court in November 2014 ruled the results unconstitutional, in a decision that critics said came “at gunpoint” from militias that controlled Tripoli.
This resulted in a split government — one in Tripoli and the other in Tobruk in eastern Libya. The elected representative body in Tobruk is now all but defunct, its mandate expired.
Ali Abdullatif Ahmida, a University of New England political scientist who specializes in Libya, places at least part of the blame on Clinton.
Our ruling
Clinton said that “the Libyan people have voted twice in free and fair elections for the kind of leadership they want.”
Even acknowledging that Clinton mentioned some of the problems with Libya’s democratization in the rest of her comments, she is spinning the facts of recent Libyan elections in the most favorable way. Security concerns kept some polling places closed, and the most recent election was punctuated by a mass shooting by Islamist attackers and the assassination of a leading human-rights advocate.
The statement is partially accurate but leaves out important details.
We rate Clinton’s statement Half True.
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