As Libya awaited results in its first nationwide parliamentary elections in almost 50 years they already seemed to have defied many expectations. They came off relatively peacefully, appeared to give advantage to liberals over Islamists and drew in groups thought to be hostile to the country’s post-revolutionary order.

A good illustration of this was the turnout in Sirte, the ancestral home town of Col Muammer Gaddafi, who was ousted in an armed Nato-backed uprising last year . As in other areas considered to be bastions of support for the Gaddafi regime, turnout in the coastal city was strong – one estimate put it at 60 to 70 per cent of Sirte’s 42,000 registered voters.

And in the south-eastern Tripoli district of Abu Salim, known as a stronghold of support for Gaddafi during his reign, voters turned out in relatively high numbers. At one voting centre near a housing complex that saw heavy fighting between Gaddafi loyalists and former revolutionary fighters, officials reported voter turnouts of higher than 50 per cent.