Eastern Libya's House of Representatives spent nearly seven years denouncing the maritime memorandum Turkiye struck with the Tripoli-based government. On October 20, it ratified the deal in a single sitting. The EU, Greece, Israel and Egypt condemned the vote, but the ratification was less a Turkish triumph than the final move in a sequence choreographed by Saddam Haftar, son of eastern military commander Khalifa Haftar, whose ultimate objective is the Libyan presidency. The opening move was a palace coup. A fortnight before the vote, the HoR unseated its 12-year speaker Aguila Saleh, removing both Cairo's principal ally in the east and the most stubborn obstacle to the memorandum's ratification. Saleh was more than a procedural roadblock: as speaker and nominal supreme commander, he embodied the de jure authority from which Khalifa's command flows, and his tribal constituency among the Obeidat gave him the standing to complicate or arbitrate any transfer of power. His successor, Al-Salhin Abdulnabi — a fellow Obeidi who chaired the HoR's Libyan-Turkish friendship committee — simultaneously defuses tribal backlash and signals where the chamber now takes direction. The architecture of Saddam's play depends on Washington. The Trump administration, through senior adviser Massad Boulos, is trying to broker a power-sharing arrangement between Tripoli and Benghazi that could install Saddam as president. For that deal to hold, he needs Ankara's endorsement — hence the maritime ratification, delivered as a down payment. He is counting on Erdogan's rapport with Trump and Turkish-Emirati lobbying to override objections from Athens, Nicosia, and an Israel uneasy about Ankara's expanding Mediterranean reach. Europe has functionally removed itself from the equation. When Benghazi expelled the EU's migration commissioner and three member-state ministers on arrival in July 2025, European capitals responded with near-silence. Months later, Athens hosted Saddam, who sidestepped any commitment on an alternative maritime memorandum. The EU's fixation on counting migrant boats leaving Libya's eastern coast for Crete has reduced its Libya policy to begging Saddam to police the very waters now in dispute — a position from which leverage is impossible. Abu Dhabi has every reason to look the other way. None of Khalifa's sons has been more faithful to the Emiratis, and installing their most loyal client at the apex of the Libyan state would cap a decade of investment in the Haftar project. Whatever the UAE's past flirtation with Greece and Cyprus, a maritime line drawn in Ankara's favour is a modest price for that outcome. Egypt is the genuine uncertainty: Cairo's objection focused narrowly on the memorandum's encroachment on its exclusive economic zone, framed in legal rather than political terms — a signal it may be keeping options open. Its transformed relationship with Ankara, alignment on Sudan and the Red Sea, and shared wariness of Israeli expansionism all complicate a simple opposition posture. The structural danger for Saddam is that he has already cashed his most valuable chip. The maritime ratification bought Turkish goodwill, but left him squeezed between Abu Dhabi — a patron he cannot cross — and Ankara, which has already pocketed its reward. Cairo could lean on its own rapport with Turkiye to champion an alternative Haftar heir: Saddam's brother Khaled, the Libyan Arab Armed Forces' chief of staff, is closer to Egypt and publicly criticised the US initiative in April. The strongest remaining card Saddam holds — cutting off support for Sudan's Rapid Support Forces, which would win favour in both Ankara and Cairo — is the one Abu Dhabi would never permit him to play. The historical irony is precise. The maritime memorandum was the price Tripoli paid for the Turkish intervention that halted Khalifa Haftar's 2020 offensive at the gates of the capital and sent his forces into retreat. Where the father tried and failed to storm Tripoli by force, the son hopes to be ushered in on the very document that sealed his father's defeat. Should Washington deliver, the instrument of the Haftars' greatest humiliation becomes the cornerstone of their dynasty. Should it baulk, it becomes the epitaph of the son's ambitions — and the alternative to an institutionalised succession is one contested, perhaps violently, by siblings and constituencies left outside the new order.
