Libya’s speaker of the Tobruk-based House of Representatives, Aguila Saleh, affirmed the rapprochement with Turkey and said he would visit Ankara in the near future.
"There is rapprochement with Turkey ... there is no permanent rupture or lasting adversary. Politics is flexible and subject to development and change," Saleh said late Wednesday in an interview with a local broadcaster.
"A visit to Turkey is planned, but it has yet to be scheduled due to recent events in Libya," he told Al-Massar TV.
Turkey had previously said that it was ready to talk to Saleh and his ally, putschist Gen. Khalifa Haftar.
Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu in December said that Saleh and Haftar had backtracked on a potential meeting.
Speaking to journalists in the capital Ankara, Çavuşoğlu explained that Turkey does not differentiate between Libya's west and the east, contrary to widespread perceptions in the media.
“Aguila Saleh wanted to come to Turkey a few times. We invited him, dates were set, then he backtracked. Haftar also wanted to come once,” the foreign minister said
Early in July, Libyan protesters stormed and set fire to the premises of the Tobruk-based House of Representatives, calling for the abolition of legislative and executive bodies and for elections to be held as soon as possible.
Once again, two competing governments are vying for control in Libya, already torn by more than a decade of civil war.
Libya has for years been split between rival administrations in the east and the west, each supported by rogue militias and foreign governments. The Mediterranean nation has been in a state of upheaval since the 2011 NATO-backed uprising toppled and later killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi.
But a plan had emerged in the past two years that was meant to put the country on the path toward elections. A U.N.-brokered process installed an interim government in early 2021 to shepherd Libyans to elections that were due late last year.
That government, led by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, briefly unified the political factions under heavy international pressure. But the voting never took place, and since then, the plan has unraveled and left the country in crisis.
Lawmakers in Libya's east-based parliament, headed by influential speaker Saleh, argued that Dbeibah’s mandate ended when the interim government failed to hold elections.
They chose Fathi Bashagha, an influential former interior minister from the western city of Misrata, as the new prime minister. Their position gained the endorsement of Haftar whose forces control the country's east and most of the south, including major oil facilities.
Dbeibah has refused to step down and factions allied with him in western Libya deeply oppose Haftar. They maintain that Dbeibah, who is also from Misrata with ties to its powerful militias, is working toward holding elections.
