By Umar Khan.
Tripoli, 3 July:
An individual candidate running in Hay Andalus district of Tripoli was accompanied by 17 volunteers from the . . .[restrict]Justice & Construction party during a door-to-door campaign on Saturday.
The Justice & Construction team, which included 11 men and six women, were distributing flyers to local residents in the Dreabi area and explaining his programme.
Although not technically prohibited, individual candidates are supposed to be independent of political parties for the elections to the National Conference.
The candidate, Nazar Kuwan, told the Libya Herald that his door-to-door campaign was intended to establish a special connection with local people. “I intend to personally visit all the areas of my constituency”, he said. “It is very important to me to connect with the people directly”.
Kuwan added that the response to his campaign has been very encouraging and that voters were very happy for the simple reason that he made the effort to visit them in person.
Asked why so many Justice & Construction party members were supporting his campaign, Kuwan was open in admitting he was a strong Muslim Brotherhood member. The Justice & Construction party is the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya.
“Although I am running independently, I am a firm Muslim Brotherhood supporter”, he said.
The public reaction to Kuwan’s approach was mixed. “I have been waiting for this opportunity since 1969, of course I’ll vote you”, one voter said. Others expressed surprise that he was being supported so openly by Justice & Construction party members.
The Dreabi area in which the campaign took place is inhabited by a large number of Amazighs, with Kuwan himself a member of the group. Dreabi has a history of opposition to Qaddafi, with many of the Tripolitanians killed in the 1996 Abu Salim massacre originating from the area.
2,501 individual candidates are taking part in the 7 July elections for 120 of the 200 seats in the National Conference, with the remaining 80 being reserved for political parties. There are 140 individual candidates contesting the three seats in Hay Andalus alone.
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