The Media Line: UN Envoy Warns Libya’s Political Roadmap Is Still Stuck 

UN Envoy Warns Libya’s Political Roadmap Is Still Stuck 

By The Media Line Staff 

The United Nations’ top envoy for Libya warned the Security Council on Wednesday that Libya’s long-stalled political process remains stuck, with rival power centers, parallel institutions, and continued delay threatening efforts to reunify the country and finally hold national elections. Hanna Tetteh, the UN secretary-general’s special representative for Libya and head of the UN Support Mission in Libya, said the roadmap she presented in August 2025 has yet to produce the political movement needed to restore democratic legitimacy and rebuild unified state institutions. 

“We are not where we would like to be in terms of progress on the roadmap,” Tetteh told the council. She said some Libyan figures were ignoring public expectations and allowing “parallel structures” to grow outside existing agreements, weakening the UN-led push to reunify the state. “Allowing status quo actors to evade their responsibilities will only undermine efforts to preserve Libya’s unity and wealth and delay the path to sustained peace, stability, and development,” she said. 

Tetteh urged council members to use their leverage to press Libyan leaders toward compromise, warning that routine political drift now serves only to entrench the current split rather than solve it. Her roadmap rests on three tracks: an electoral framework for presidential and parliamentary voting, the formation of a unified government, and a broader structured dialogue involving Libyans from across the country. 

Libya has remained fractured for years, with rival institutions in the east and west, and a planned December 2021 election collapsed over disputes about candidacies and election rules. The country has also lived with competing governments since the failure of the UN-backed transition meant to unify the state after the 2020 ceasefire period. 

There has been at least one recent sign of possible coordination: this month, Libya’s rival legislative bodies approved the country’s first unified state budget in more than a decade, a move welcomed as a step toward financial reconciliation. Still, Tetteh’s message was clear: a budget is not a ballot box, and Libya’s political deadlock is far from over.