Can the HoR and HCS meetings in Cairo lead to a new unity government for Libya?

Last week, 90 members of the House of Representatives (HoR) and 50 members of the High Council of State (HCS) convened in Cairo to announce a final statement laying the groundwork for the formation of a new unity government and the holding of general elections according to already established electoral laws.

This meeting, a follow-up to the February HoR and HCS gathering in Tunis, signals the failure of the trilateral track that included the Presidential Council (PC) and HCS Chairman Mohamed Takala. Given its many shortcomings, this political development will require significant international effort to transform the meeting’s final statement into a political breakthrough.

A closer look

As outlined in our previous reporting, the future of Libya’s political process can be broken down into three distinct scenarios.

The most elusive, the renewal of a Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF) engineered by the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL), remains highly unlikely due to tense global geopolitics and a lack of appropriate tools on the ground that hinder the Deputy Special Representative to the Secretary-General (DSRSG) from steering the political wheel.

The most desirable scenario, where the HCS, HoR, and PC continue with their political process and achieve a breakthrough through a second meeting in Cairo, has not materialized due to Takala’s staunch alignment with Government of National Unity (GNU) Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dabaiba.

Consequently, the highly fraught scenario of the intra-Libyan process spearheaded by a joint committee between the two chambers and supported avidly by HoR Speaker Agila Saleh has become reality. By facilitating a meeting of the HoR and HCS joint committee in Cairo with the help of Egypt, Saleh has initiated some form of a political process, though it falls short of being a political tour de force for Libya.