By Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian
On May 6, Lebanon held
its first parliamentary elections in nearly a decade. They were
held under a new electoral law with a proportional
representation component. Previously, all seats were allocated
under the first past the post method.
Lebanon’s 128-seat parliament allocates 64
seats each to the country’s Christian and Muslim faiths. They
are then further subdivided between all of Lebanon’s 18
officially recognised religious sects.
Lebanese leaders saw the new system as a way
to enable independent and civil society groups to compete
against established, largely sectarian-based parties and
political bosses.
The election marked the entrance of civil
society groups into the electoral sphere, with independent
candidates running as part of a campaign known as We Are All the
Nation.
By 2018, the wave of electoral activism had
led to the creation of a coalition of 11 civil society groups
challenging establishment parties in 9 of Lebanon’s 15
districts.
It didn’t work out that way. The strong hold
sectarianism has among Lebanese saw traditional parties win out
against civil society challengers. In this election, they took
only one seat.
The big winners were the two main Shia
Muslims parties. Hezbollah and its Shia Muslim partner Amal won
28 seats between them (17 for Anal, 14 for Hezbollah) ; another
13 seats were won by other political parties and deputies
aligned with them. This makes a total of 44 out of 128 seats in
parliament.
By renewing their alliance with President
Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a Maronite
Christian party which took 25 seats, the two Shia groups will
control enough seats needed to block the most important actions
of parliament, for which a two-thirds quorum of members is
required.
It is the first such alliance between major
Maronite Christian and Shia Muslim political parties in
Lebanon’s history.
However, the FPM lost a few seats to Samir
Geagea’s Lebanese Forces (LF), a more militant Christian
grouping, which doubled its number of seats to 14. Still, the
FPM remains the largest Christian presence in parliament.
Lebanon’s sectarian political structure is
often exploited by outside powers, including Syria, Iran and
Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah
has sent thousands of its fighters to Syria to support forces
loyal to President Bashar al-Assad in the civil war.
So not surprisingly, pro-Syrian politicians
made their strongest electoral comeback since Damascus ended a
nearly three-decade military presence in Lebanon in 2005. Syrian
allies elected included former security chief Jamil Sayyed,
former deputy parliament speaker Elie Firzly and former defence
minister Abdul-Rahim Murad.
Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah called
the results a “great political and moral victory for the
resistance option that protects the sovereignty of the country.”
It was “mission accomplished.”
Prime
Minister Saad Hariri’s Future Movement (FM) won 19 seats in
the voting, and though this was a major decline, he will still
have the largest Sunni Muslim bloc in parliament.
Harari may have suffered from his abortive
decision to resign as prime minister while visiting Saudi Arabia
last November. He eventually returned to Beirut and rescinded
his resignation, but it looked as if the Saudis, evidently
concerned by the influence of Hezbollah in Lebanese politics,
were behind it.
His own father Rafik, who was also a prime
minister, was assassinated in 2005; Hezbollah has been blamed
for the murder.
Now, waning support from Saudi Arabia
undermined the party’s electoral machine and ability to dole out
patronage. The FM lost to Hezbollah and Amal-backed Sunni
candidates even in Hariri’s strongholds of Beirut, Saida and
Tripoli.
“We had hoped for a better result, it’s
true,” stated Hariri. “And we were hoping for a wider bloc, with
a higher Shia and Christian representation, that’s also true.”
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