#lyelect

Few observers have any illusions that the elections themselves will solve any of Libya's many problems, from economic woes to the absence of effective state institutions to the continuing role of armed militias. The absence of any prior history of such elections makes it almost impossible to predict the likely winners. And the experience of countless transitional elections elsewhere warns against exaggerated hopes for a smooth political ride to come. There will be fierce struggles for power and positions as a government is formed, existential decisions to be made by the election's losers about whether and how to contest their defeat, and looming battles about core questions of the country's identity and direction. But the high participation in and smooth progress of the elections will help to ground those coming political battles within a legitimate, democratic and hopefully resilient institutional framework.

In short, July 7 was only one day in Libya.  But it was a good day.

And then the bottom half of the page lists books and reports re: recent developments in Libya.

He [Mahmoud Jibril] and his allies publicly echoed a frequent refrain of Libyan voters who were unsure what to make of re-emergent groups like the Muslim Brotherhood: “Do they think they are more Muslim than we are?”

A political scientist who earned his doctoral degree at the University of Pittsburgh and taught there as well, Mr. Jibril said in a recent interview on Libyan television that friends and neighbors anywhere he has lived would describe him as someone who “goes to the mosque for Friday prayers, and we see that he prays.”

“The Libyan people don’t need either liberalism or secularism, or pretenses in the name of Islam, because Islam, this great religion, cannot be used for political purposes,” he said. “Islam is much bigger than that.”