TRIPOLI - Libya's Muslim Brotherhood united with other Islamists on Friday to establish a new political party that is set to be a leading player in the country's first elections since the overthrow of Moamer Gathafi.

Secular parties and Islamist will vie in June elections for seats in a national assembly that will draft a new constitution for the North African country.

Post-uprising elections have already brought Islamists into government in Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco since October and they are likely to perform well in Libya, a socially conservative country where alcohol was already banned before the revolution.

A senior official in the National Transitional Council (NTC) and a member of the commission responsible for organising the elections, Lamine Belhadj, who heads the committee that is working to set up the new party, said at a conference on Friday it would bring together Islamists of different stripes.

"This is the founding conference of a national, civil party with an Islamic frame of reference. It is being established by the Muslim Brotherhood and many independents who are not affiliated with any Islamic organisations," he said.

Belhadj said the new party had yet to be named and its leaders had not been chosen as consultations were under way between the Brotherhood and other groups.

The rise of Islamist parties at the ballot box has raised concerns among more secular Arabs that new governments will impose more religious restrictions on society or seek to make post-uprising constitutions comply with Islamic law, or sharia.

Libya's NTC has already indicated that the country will be run in accordance with sharia, though the exact place of sharia in the legal system will only be settled once a new constitution is written after elections.

Belhadj said there was little disagreement on the issue of sharia in Libya, whose citizens are virtually all Sunni Muslims.

"All the parties cannot but adopt an Islamic frame of reference because the Libyan people are Muslim," he said.

Libya's Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1949 as an offshoot of the eponymous Egyptian organisation but was banned and unable to hold public meetings in Libya until November 2011.