Salam Fayyad’s return to Palestine politics

 Former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad announced March 9 his plans to participate in the upcoming Palestinian Legislative Council elections. In a wide-ranging interview published on the front page of the leading Palestinian daily newspaper Al Quds, Fayyad said he plans to “establish a list of independent individuals to participate in the upcoming legislative elections in an honorable, transparent and competitive way.”

Omar Bseiso, a Gaza-based elections expert, told Al-Monitor that the announcement of the former prime minister is a reminder to Palestinian voters of the right they "have been deprived of for over 15 years.” Bseiso, who worked on Fayyad’s 2006 campaign, said the only problem he has with Fayyad is “his long political and social absence.”

Fayyad, who is now a visiting professor at Princeton University, told Al-Monitor that his absence was forced on him. “After the end of my time in the government I tried to work in civil society and set up an NGO but the prevailing powers barred our organization from work in 2015.”

In February 2017, the UN secretary-general offered Fayad the position of peace envoy to Libya but his appointment was nixed in a bizarre way. Nikki Haley, then the US envoy to the UN, blocked Fayyad’s appointment because he is Palestinian. Haley said the United States does not recognize a Palestinian state “or support the signal” that Fayyad’s appointment would send.