Other candidates include Fathih Bashagar, a former interior minister and fellow Misrati who has cultivated ties with Turkey and Western governments.

The international community made the elections a key part of a ceasefire deal that ended the battle of Tripoli last year. They hope it will provide a clean slate on which to build a political settlement that will end a decade of war and civil strife as rival militias and warlords fought for dominance.

But doubts are growing about whether the vote will go ahead as planned.

There is little more than two weeks left to campaign, electoral law is a mess, and rival militia groups have been on recruiting drives in preparation for the power struggle on the streets that many assume will follow the vote. “Security violations” – diplomatic code for gun battles – are widely assumed to be inevitable.

“I don’t think anything is going to happen this year and this is not because there are just a few minor technical details to be fixed, its because the only electoral laws that were embraced by international community are weak, incomplete and controversial,” said Jalel Harchaoui, a senior fellow at the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

“We are not going to relapse into the spectacular fireworks type of war of 2019 to 2020. [Candidates] need to be the big bad kid on the block in order to be heard in the context of negotiations. But of course you need to look scary and compelling if you want to get heard,” he added of the militia build up.

That is another factor that militates against a Gaddafi return.

Gen Haftar’s Libyan National Army – itself made up of a large number of co-opted local militias – may have been defeated in its bid to storm Tripoli, but is still a very potent force that dominates eastern and southern swathes of the country.

Mr Dabaiba is an influential figure in Misrata, a trading port that often behaves like an autonomous city-state and fields a powerful band of militias that were key in thwarting Gen Haftar’s grab for Tripoli.

Mr Gaddafi, by contrast, has no military muscle and is effectively in hiding, fearful of assassination or arrest. He survived at least one attempt on his life in 2017, is still wanted by the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and has yet to clear the 2015 war crimes conviction.

In August Libyan prosecutors issued a fresh arrest warrant over his alleged link with the Russian mercenaries from the Wagner private military company.

There are widespread rumours that Wagner mercenaries, who fought for Gen Haftar in the siege of Tripoli but since appear to have abandoned the general, provided the security when he showed up in Sabha to lodge his application as a candidate in November.

Russia is known to have reached out to Mr Gaddafi to balance its reliance on Gen Haftar, but foreign backing is hardly an advertisement for a man claiming to be beloved by his public.

Mr Gaddafi’s candidacy is still not certain – the elections commission said on Friday it intended to appeal against the appeal. But ironically, that might play to his advantage.

“Saif is not popular among everyone. And he doesn’t have an armed force and he has to come out of hiding – that does not add up to a strong position,” said Tim Eaton, a Libya watcher at the Chatham House think tank. “But if excluded he can avoid being tainted by an election defeat and remain on the scene.”