Protesters angry at the distribution of seats in the Congress shot down a Libyan Air Force helicopter delivering ballots here on Friday, killing an election official, the United Nations said.
In Tripoli, a militia member threatened an international monitor with a knife in the street while a brigade of other fighters controlled a hotel housing the main observation teams.
Farther west, in Bani Walid, the last bastion of support for Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, local officials were vowing armed resistance if the interim government tried to send soldiers or police officers to protect the polls.
Libya has been riven for decades by recurring battles among regions and tribes, each vying for a cut of the oil wealth and other privileges.
Many here still hope that the election of a new national congress, scheduled for Saturday, will offer a more peaceful way to resolve differences and divvy up the spoils without the iron fist or outstretched palms of the old Qaddafi government.
And if Libya succeeds in building a new democracy, it will become not only a rarity in the Arab world, but also unique among the major oil exporters of the developing world.
But even before the voters head to the polls, the forces of tribal and regional rivalry that have driven Libyan politics for more than a half century are endangering the dream of a fresh start. In every neighborhood or town in the country, politicians say, residents complain that they were “marginalized” for decades under Colonel Qaddafi and deprived of their share of Libya’s wealth. And from the revolution’s birthplace here in Benghazi to Colonel Qaddafi’s last citadel in Bani Walid, many discontents now say that they fear new neglect under a more democratic Libya.
“Politics in Libya has been all about patronage,” said Diederik Vandewalle, a Libya scholar at Dartmouth College visiting Tripoli for the vote, “and it is only going to intensify after the election.”
The weak, self-appointed Transitional National Council that has attempted to govern Libya since the fall of Colonel Qaddafi initially promised to hold an election for a national congress that would govern the country for 18 months while it also drafted a new constitution. Electing the same body to govern and draft a constitution was considered the best practice, because it would reduce the possibility that some temporary external authority would attempt to influence the constitutional debate.
But faced with mounting protests over the regional distribution of the congress’s 200 seats — 100 for the west around Tripoli, 60 for the less populous east around Benghazi and 40 for the southern desert region — the transitional council has chipped away at its initial plan in a vain attempt to placate the unrest.
First, the council changed its plan so that the national congress would not draft the constitution itself, but would instead pick a 60-person body, with 20 members from each region, to write a new charter.
Then, on Thursday, in its last meeting before the election, the council stripped the proposed congress of any role in drafting in the constitution, drastically changing the function of the chamber for which candidates were running. Instead, the council decreed that there would be a second public vote to choose the members of the 60-person constitutional panel. So the original 200-member congress would be responsible mainly for forming a new transitional government to run the country for the next 18 months, when a new constitution is expected to be in place and yet another round of elections held.
The transitional council’s new plan all but invites conflict between the 200-member congress and the 60-person constitutional panel, and on Friday candidates for the congress were already talking about undoing the latest arrangement.
The concession to regional equality also did not stop the increasingly violent protests against the election system. On Thursday, an attack on an election office in the eastern town of Ajdabiya destroyed so many ballots that people there may be unable to vote. Protesters had already stormed election facilities in Benghazi and Tobruk, trashing computers and burning piles of ballots.
On Friday, people in eastern Libya protesting the election shut down three major oil facilities and cut off half the flow of Libya’s oil exports, Reuters reported. There were brawls on the streets of Benghazi between supporters of the election and those favoring a boycott. And other demonstrators continued to block the coastal road connecting the country’s east and west, shutting off almost all traffic.
With the official campaign lasting only two weeks and no recent history of electoral politics, there has been almost no discussion of ideology or governing philosophy. Even the question of Islam’s role in governance — a defining issue in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia — is an obscure footnote here. Both liberal and Islamist parties call for Islamic law to be a main source of legislation, but not the only one. The Islamist party founded by Abdel Hakim Belhaj, who once led a militant Islamist insurgency, features unveiled women in its billboards and candidate lists, while a rival party founded by the Muslim Brotherhood calls for fostering greater participation from women in education, employment and government.
But even the Brotherhood, the party with the most developed ideology, is promising patronage. Alluding to those cities and tribes that suffered the most in fighting Colonel Qaddafi’s security forces and are now the most powerful, the Brotherhood’s party program pledges “compensation to the victims of the military, whether individuals or groups.”
Voter registration has been high: 2.8 million, or about 85 percent of eligible voters in a country of about 6 million. But in dozens of interviews in recent days, almost no one could name the candidate, among more than 3,700 competing, for whom he or she planned to vote. Most said proudly that they intended to choose the best candidate for Libya, and several admitted an intention to vote for a candidate who belonged to his tribe or family.
“We are racist and each will vote for his own tribe — and not only his own tribe, but the family within the tribe closest to his,” said Abdel Salem Ijfara, 57, a member of the Warfalla tribe from Bani Walid.
Especially among the Warfalla, Libya’s largest tribe, many people said they planned to cast a ballot for Mahmoud Jabril, the former prime minister of the interim government and a member of the tribe from Bani Walid. Mr. Jabril is not actually eligible or running for the congress, but he has founded a political party, and his name appears larger than that of the party or its candidates on most of its posters.
Inexperience is the biggest common denominator among the candidates, even compared with those competing in the post-revolutionary elections in Egypt and Tunisia. Colonel Qaddafi’s strategy of keeping the country decentralized and divided to bolster his own power has added to the difficulties in unifying the nation.
The party of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Libyan branch of the 84-year-old Egyptian Islamist organization, may be the best organized. But when it called a rally for the last official night of the campaign in the center of Tripoli, the capital, on Thursday, only about 150 people turned up.
The organizers seemed unsure what to do. There were no speeches, few slogans and ultimately three young men ran in circles carrying flags emblazoned with the party logo.
Still, the vote has elicited some unexpected expressions of national unity. In response to the growing protests in the east over the distribution of seats, the western city of Zawiyah announced that it would donate all of its seats in the congress to the eastern city of Benghazi. Though legally questionable, the gesture recalled feelings of national solidarity that had all but vanished since the ouster of Colonel Qaddafi.