Seif al-Islam Gaddafi’s killing has already been packaged as a national turning point: the removal of a “third option” for Libya, and to some, the end of a supposed last bridge out of Libya’s stagnation. That framing draws on a much older Libyan script – one the country has lived with since 2011 and, in truth, since 1969 – a politics of personas, where a single name stands in for the state and substitutes for a governing program.
For years, Seif’s influence rested less on what he built than on what different constituencies wanted or could read into him: a vessel for nostalgia, a lever for sidelined networks, a threat to incumbents, a contingency for foreign backers, and a convenient screen for public frustration. His death therefore carries weight beyond its immediate effects (and violence). It brings into focus the narratives that have kept Libyan politics afloat, and what they conceal about power and the legacies that still structure the country’s present.
Small wonder, then, that his killing is being narrated as the end of a “last chance” for Libya to escape its present. What really has been punctured by his death is the projection around him, and it mattered because it did real political work: it organized loyalties, animated bargaining, and kept rivals in check despite his absence from the actual public Libyan sphere.
Seif emerged from 2011 with a damaged hand, his once-cultivated “reformist” reputation in tatters, and a very narrow horizon. Yet he outlasted capture, an ICC warrant, a death sentence, and years of detention as Libya splintered into competing jurisdictions, each guarding its own leverage. He was held in a remote corner of Zintan, where his captors treated him as a bargaining asset and, after seizing him while he fled toward Niger, developed a Lima-syndrome-like attachment to him (he eventually was also more valuable to them free than in a cell).
Unofficially released from detention in 2017, he then cultivated his legend in the half-light through occasional statements and carefully rationed appearances – present enough to be invoked, absent enough to be imagined. In a country exhausted by permanent transition and successive conflicts, absence can be forged into authority, welded together by longing and fatigue. It leaves room for projection – a dynamic he, above all, benefited from.
That projection around Seif produced a convenient story: that he was, or could become, a unifying figure for the “Green” current – the loose constellation of former Gaddafi regime loyalists and constituencies still attached, in varying ways, to the symbolism and networks of the Gaddafi era. Some took the claim further, portraying him as a potential rallying point for Libyans disillusioned with the revolution itself. His fiery threats and dark forecasts of Libya’s descent into chaos in 2011 later acquired an almost prophetic aura in some circles. The premonitions were probably owed less to foresight than to his intimate knowledge of the brittle system his family had long presided over, but they still resonated strongly with politically inexperienced audiences.
Often overlooked is a simpler point: beyond being polarizing across Libya, Seif was never a natural unifying figure within the “Green” current itself. A significant share of those stakeholders never forgave him for the early-2000s “liberalization” agenda, nor for the limited reforms and outreach to Islamists and opposition figures he spearheaded. In their view, his cardinal sin was trying to change a Jamahiriya that did not need changing. His approach was therefore recalled less as warranted course correction than as the first loosening thread in an otherwise perfect system that came apart in 2011. During the revolution, he did more than stand by his father — he emerged as one of the regime’s most forceful public defenders, openly calling for repression, shedding the reformist language he once championed, and railing against Western backers of the uprising. That turn won him little forgiveness across much of the Green camp. The old Libyan green flag still carries emotional weight, but its heir-apparent never truly inherited consensus.
Where he did consolidate support within those constituencies post-2011, it often had more to do with greed, machinations, and plain opportunism than with any settled conviction in him as a political project. To be sure, some within the “Greens” saddled themselves to him out of ideological commitment to the Gaddafi family. Others were more pragmatic: they saw him as the only figure who could “salvage” their networks without forcing them into subservience to the new custodians of the state.
When Seif submitted his candidacy papers for the 2021 presidential elections, it felt like a Hail Mary, a last-ditch wager that briefly electrified these constituencies and gave them a banner to rally behind. His surprise candidacy was quickly turned into leverage. To their credit, the “Greens” tended to be comparatively better organized than their post-revolutionary counterparts, a trait shaped as much by their collective interests as their decades-long experience ruling Libya as a clique. Through his name, and at times through claims of representing him, former-regime figures pressed for recognition and seats in dialogue and reconciliation forums. This allowed them to carve out space and relevance, with his name doing much of the work that his politics never did. It also helps explain how he could poll so high in popularity, all while saying so little.
His own conduct fed that effect. Opportunism was evident in the timing and manner of his attempted comeback, his selective engagement with the international press, and his careful signaling of autonomy from compromised elites by avoiding alliances with them. Externally, he retained value as a fallback option for Moscow, shaped in part by persistent Russian caution toward Khalifa Haftar given his US ties, CIA affiliation, and checkered history. At home, Seif’s appeal rested on a mix of nostalgia, long absence, and a youthful population ready to project onto a familiar surname that became synonymous with “stability”. In that sense he became a blank screen for public frustration, and his silence worked as a kind of amplifier.
Often forgotten is that, on the rare occasions he spoke, the spell briefly slipped. In a 2021 interview with The New York Times Magazine – a choreographed event designed to stage-manage his return – he explained that he had been away from Libyans for a decade and would need to come back “slowly, slowly” – “like a striptease” – and, as he put it, “play with their minds a little.” The line landed like a pin to a balloon. In a few blunt sentences, the haze that had gathered around him thinned, exposing a view of politics as performance and consent as something he needed to engineer. With it came a reminder of the contempt with which Seif had long regarded Libyans – once as a people to be repressed and admonished for dreaming of a better life, now as an audience to be manipulated for his own political resurrection.
Seif’s missteps notwithstanding, his residual appeal fed off the other two main presidential incumbents – Abdulhamid Dbeiba and Khalifa Haftar. Their polarizing grip on power, and the anguish it produced, created the very demand his name could satisfy. Haftar’s camp, in particular, had long worked to fold Gaddafi-era figures into its orbit through military channels and former intelligence networks, a trend that began early and deepened after the launch of the 2014 Operation Dignity. GNU Prime Minister Dbeiba – himself a Gaddafi-era contractor whose wealth was built through regime-era sweetheart deals – followed in 2021 with business and political networks, trading access for loyalty and positioning himself as the gateway to spoils. In both cases, incorporation came on their terms, inside their hierarchy, with little space for “Greens” to have any autonomy.
This pattern of co-optation helps explain why hostility toward Seif became a rare bipartisan point of convergence between the two otherwise rival incumbents to the 2021 presidential elections. Seif was one of the few figures whose name could plausibly pull those incorporated networks back out again and reorganize them around an alternative center of gravity. The question was not only whether he might take formal office. It was the organizational threat he posed. Even without territory, weapons or a coherent party structure, he could draw segments of the “Green” constituency out of other actors’ orbit and reconstitute an alternative hierarchy of patronage outside the incumbents’ familial nodes of control.
Layered onto all of that was his residual appeal among Libya’s youth, many of whom, driven by exhaustion, destitution, and nostalgia, bought into Seif’s myth with only a faint sense of what the Gaddafi era entailed. In a landscape where desperation was often the closest thing many Libyans had to a shared condition, Seif could unwittingly appear as a remedy. The cancellation of the elections – partly entangled with the controversy around his candidacy – only amplified that effect, casting him as a political martyr. Ironically, the post-2021 environment fed the legend further. After the election cancellation, both Dbeiba and Haftar pursued respective centralization drives, narrowed patronage circles, and presided over economic deterioration that catalyzed public frustration. In those conditions, an absent man with a name that resonates can look like an “alternative” without having to demonstrate competence. So, his myth drew strength from the failures of those still in power.
With Seif now assassinated, speculation has raced ahead of facts. With little more than the bare confirmation of a killing, public suspicion has predictably drifted toward political rivals as the likeliest culprits, even as nothing has been substantiated. Conspiracy, too, is rife, with whispers of foreign intelligence involvement. In today’s transactional, dog-eats-dog world, such suspicions are hardly far-fetched. Regardless, the likelier outcome is that – like many of Libya’s modern tragedies – the truth never fully surfaces, and accountability rarely follows.
What is clear is that the prospect of his political comeback which animated parts of his constituency – out of creed or greed – is effectively gone. It is difficult to imagine another figure from within the Gaddafi family replacing him as even a loosely unifying reference point. The likelier outcome is fragmentation and redistribution, old networks scattering into existing hierarchies, or being parceled out as small tributaries to larger patrons.
That alone should temper any temptation to treat his removal as the loss of a viable governing alternative. More broadly, a politics built on symbolism and network gravity cannot stand in for principles, institutions, and basic accountability. In Seif’s case, the covering was already wearing thin. To borrow from his own words, he may not have finished his “striptease”, but the rare moments he did step into view did him few favors, and he was never especially good at concealing the instincts and agenda beneath the performance. His assassination does solidify him as a martyr, but it should not invite a retrospective elevation into a statesman he never was.
None of this implies he deserved to be assassinated. He did not. States are not built through killings at dusk by masked men lurking in shadows, and societies do not heal by outsourcing justice to the gun. But truth still matters. Seif was not simply a casualty of Libya’s disorder. He was also complicit in, and a willing public face of, a decades-long system that normalized injustice and unlawful violence, leaving scars that Libyans still carry. In the end, he became both author and artifact of that order, and he now fatally bears its final mark. If his death is being framed as the end of a “last chance”, that says more about how impoverished Libya’s political menu has become than about the promise he ever offered.
