Weekly Standard
In a remarkable development, the people of Libya on Sunday voted against the seemingly-irresistible advance of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in the “Arab Spring” countries of North Africa. Until Libyan ballots began coming in, Western media seemed assured that the MB would repeat, in that country, its successes elsewhere over the past year. In Tunisia last October, the Ennahda or Rebirth party won 37 percent at the polls. In Morocco’s November contest, the MB’s Justice and Development party gained enough strength to form a government under its leadership. Since then, however, Morocco has remained largely tranquil.
The Egyptian triumph of the MB’s Freedom and Justice party (FJP), which took 37.5 percent in the November 2011-January 2012 parliamentary competition, was followed by the election of the party’s Mohamed Morsi as Egypt’s president. Morsi’s victory appeared to confirm the role of the MB as the main successor to dictatorships in the Arab lands.
The Libyan vote calls that conclusion into question. Voters were selecting 200 parliamentarians who will write a new constitution—80 representing political parties and 120 individuals. In preliminary counting, Mahmoud Jibril’s centrist Alliance of National Forces gained 80 percent in Tripoli and 60 percent in Benghazi. Jibril is the head of the National Transitional Council (NTC) and a political scientist who studied and taught in the United States. (Though the same may be said of many radical Islamists; American education, unfortunately, does not inoculate against extremist ideology.)
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