Libya’s ex-interim PM leads in election

THE moderate National Forces Alliance of wartime prime minister Mahmoud Jibril scored a landslide victory over rival Islamist parties in Libya’s first free national election in a generation, partial tallies showed on Friday.Counts from across the North African country attested to a resounding defeat for the political wing of Libya’s Muslim Brotherhood, bucking a trend of success for Islamist groups in other Arab Spring countries such as Egypt and Tunisia.Final official results are not due until next week. But with a large majority of votes counted, Jibril’s alliance had unbeatable leads in Tripoli, the desert south, and the eastern city of Benghazi, the cradle of last year’s rebellion against 42 years of Muammar Gaddafi’s rule.“The people saw in Jibril an openness to the rest of the world and they craved this openness after being closed off by Gaddafi,” Libyan political analyst Nasser Ahdash said of the Western-educated politician who became the face of last year’s uprising.Another Islamist group, the al-Watan (“Homeland”) party of former Islamist militant Abdul Hakim Belhadj, failed to take off. Belhadj was even set to lose in his Tripoli constituency.“We’ve got to reevaluate our performance and decide what kind of alliances we would like to make or to be a strong opposition by ourselves,” party spokesman Anas Al-Fetory said.No immediate comment was available from the NFA or Justice and Construction, the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood.In Central Tripoli district, Jibril’s alliance won 46,000 votes against 4,000 for Justice and Construction. He scored victories in three other Tripoli districts and an allied party won the fifth.