Libya’s eastern-based House of Representatives was elected on 25 June 2014 for an 18-month term that expired on 20 October 2015. It has not faced voters since. Eleven years into that overstay, on Monday 5 October 2026, 98 of its 170 members voted to cap someone else’s time in office: a new rule limiting the speaker and deputy speakers to a single 12-month term. The next day the chamber used it, or something close enough, to remove Aguila Saleh after almost 12 years as speaker, as Al Jazeera reported. His replacement, elected the same day in Benghazi: Al-Salhin Abdelnabi al-Obeidi, an engineer and MP for Tobruk who chairs the parliament’s Libyan-Turkish friendship committee and, notably, shares Saleh’s tribal background.
The House also elected new deputies, Tarek al-Ashtar as first deputy speaker and Mesbah Douma as second — Douma had chaired the removal session itself, a procedural detail reported by the Libya Observer. Saleh had tried to stop this before it started. He told local media the Monday term-limit vote was “not official and had no legal effect,” and said he had called off the Tuesday session where his own removal was carried out anyway. The objection did not hold: a body that has governed for a decade past its mandate on the strength of its own say-so is not well placed to insist that procedure matters when the procedure cuts against it.
There was significant discontent among MPs with the previous leadership over numerous errors. We tried to engage with the leadership to address these issues, but to no avail. Among these errors were decisions made without consulting MPs.
That is lawmaker Jebree Oheida, speaking to Reuters and quoted in Al Jazeera’s reporting. It is the kind of complaint — decisions made without consulting the people who are supposed to ratify them — that describes most of what has gone wrong with Libyan governance since 2014, not just Saleh’s tenure specifically.
Whose problem this actually solves
Saleh, 82, was elected speaker on 4 August 2014 and became, as a side effect of the chamber’s internal disputes, Libya’s internationally recognised head of state from 2014 to 2021 — a role contested the whole time by rival claimants in Tripoli. He survived a November 2014 ruling by Tripoli’s Supreme Judicial Council that declared the entire House dissolved (the House simply rejected the ruling as issued under militia pressure) and a February 2015 bombing of his residence by ISIL. Twelve years is a long run by the standards of a country that has had five rival governments since 2011. What ended it was not legal process. It was Saddam Haftar.
Agila Saleh appears to be the latest casualty of Saddam Haftar’s drive to centralise decision-making in eastern Libya and bulldoze his way into a political role.
The assessment is from Emadeddin Badi, an analyst at Chatham House, quoted in Al Jazeera’s reporting. Saleh had been a dependable ally of Khalifa Haftar, the field marshal whose Libyan National Army controls the east and whose Benghazi-based parliament underwrites it. But Khalifa Haftar is 82 and has six sons; Saddam, the one running the LNA’s day-to-day operations and its Washington diplomacy, is the presumed heir. A speaker with his own 12-year power base and his own habit of ignoring rulings he doesn’t like is a redundant node in a system one man is trying to make legible to outsiders — chiefly the United States.
| From | To | How |
|---|---|---|
| Khalifa Haftar (LNA commander, 82) | Saddam Haftar (son, LNA deputy commander) | father, heir apparent |
| Khalifa Haftar (LNA commander, 82) | Government of National Stability (acting PM Osama Hammad) | military backing |
| Saddam Haftar (son, LNA deputy commander) | House of Representatives (170 seats, Benghazi/Tobruk) | pressure to centralise |
| House of Representatives (170 seats, Benghazi/Tobruk) | Aguila Saleh (speaker 2014–2026) | removed |
| House of Representatives (170 seats, Benghazi/Tobruk) | Al-Obeidi (new speaker, elected Oct 6) | elected |
| House of Representatives (170 seats, Benghazi/Tobruk) | Government of National Stability (acting PM Osama Hammad) | legislative support |
There is a specific, documented reason to think Saddam Haftar needs eastern institutions to look centralised right now. Since June 2026, the Trump administration’s special adviser for Arab and African affairs, Massad Boulos, has been pushing a plan to unify Libya’s rival governments. The one concrete result after nearly a year of talks is a unified national budget, adopted in April — described by people close to the process as Boulos’s “only tangible achievement,” Minbar Libya reported. The Financial Times reported in June, citing unnamed sources, that Washington’s plan would put Saddam Haftar at the head of Libya’s Presidential Council, currently chaired by Mohamed Menfi, with Abdul Hamid Dbeibah staying on as prime minister in Tripoli. The analyst Jalel Harchaoui called the Saddam Haftar appointment “the main element of the deal,” telling Minbar Libya it would hand both men “national legitimacy” and let them govern “without elections for at least a year, probably longer.”
Saleh had reason to feel sidelined by that process even before Tuesday’s vote. On 19 July he told reporters the Tobruk-based legislature had “so far not received anything official” about Boulos’s initiative, despite being, nominally, one of the institutions it was meant to unify. A speaker who isn’t being briefed on the plan that will decide his patron’s son’s formal title is a speaker who has already lost the argument; Tuesday’s vote just made it official.
A mandate nobody checked
The House of Representatives elected in June 2014 drew roughly 18% turnout, down from about 60% in [the 2012 election](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Representatives_(Libya)) that produced its predecessor body. It has extended its own mandate at least once by internal vote — 112 to 131, in October 2015 — rather than hold a new election. An August 2026 agreement among rival factions, the so-called 4+4 committee mediated by the UN support mission, is supposed to produce elections within two years; Libya has missed that kind of deadline before. Meanwhile the practical failures of eastern governance that Oheida was complaining about are not abstract: as reported, teachers in Libya closed schools this month over unpaid wages, a dispute that has nothing to do with who holds the speaker’s gavel and everything to do with whether either Libyan government can run basic services.
The twelve-month term limit that just ended Saleh’s run is, on paper, binding on his successor too. Whether it survives longer than the chamber’s own eighteen-month mandate did — eleven years and counting — is the number worth checking back on, along with whether Saddam Haftar’s name actually ends up on a document in Washington, or stays, like most things in this story, an arrangement nobody has put in writing.