Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent.
For at least the past six months, France has been pushing for elections to be held in Libya by the end of this year. At a conference in Paris in May, representatives of various Libyan factions settled on a date: Dec. 10.
Yet there have always been questions about whether this was even remotely realistic. Seven years after former dictator Moammar Gadhafi was toppled and killed, Libya remains highly unstable, its politics organized around the rivalry between the United Nations-backed government in Tripoli, headed by Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, and Field Marshal Khalifa Haftar, a Gadhafi-era general who now leads the breakaway Libyan National Army, which controls much of the east.