Top parties seek to protect monopoly as Lebanon votes
BEIRUT: Lebanese voters went to the polls to elect their parliament for the first time in nine years Sunday, with top parties expected to preserve a fragile powersharing arrangement despite regional tensions.
The Iran- backed Hezbollah movement and its allies could stand to reinforce their clout on the political game in Lebanon, a small country clamped between war-torn Syria and Israel.
The election comes after a drawn- out political stalemate finally produced a new electoral law in 2017 that introduced a proportional list-based system.
The campaign passed without major incidents but security forces were out en masse across a country still sporadically rocked by attacks and with a history of political assassinations.
Queues of voters started forming outside some polling stations in Lebanon’s main cities even before they opened at 7am ( 0400 GMT).
“It’s the first time I vote,” Therese, 60, told AFP outside a voting centre in central Beirut.
“I’ve come to support civil society because there’s nobody else I like in this country, but I doubt they will win,” she said.
More than 3.7 million Lebanese are eligible to vote, and will chose from 597 candidates who are running on 77 closed lists for a seat in the 128- strong parliament.
Turnout will be crucial to a new civil society movement’s chances of clinching a handful of seats but analysts predict the traditional sectarian- based parties will maintain their hegemony.
“Will Hezbollah be the biggest winner? At the very least, it won’t be a loser,” said Imad Salamey, a political science professor at Beirut’s Lebanese American University.
Candidates mostly avoided the polarising issue of disarming Hezbollah, the only faction not to have laid down its weapons after the 1975-1990 civil war.
The Shiite movement may only gain a handful of seats but it will benefit from the predicted absence of a united bloc against it, Salamey said, and could play the role of kingmaker in parliament.
The triumvirate heading the state is unlikely to change, with parliamentary speaker Nabih Berri, the octogenarian leader of the rival yet often allied Shiite party Amal, almost certain to keep the post he has held since 1992.
President Michel Aoun’s position is not up for renewal but his Christian party is a key player in the vote, for which a reformed, more proportional electoral law is in force. — AFP