LEBANON VOTING TODAY
Officials carrying a ballot box ahead of today’s parliamentary election in Beirut on Saturday. —
beirut — Polling stations employees in Lebanon have begun distributing thousands of ballot boxes ahead of the country’s first parliamentary elections in nine years.
The distribution began on Saturday, a day before more than 3.6 million registered Lebanese voters are set to cast their ballots.
The vote, the first for a parliament since 2009, is also the first since Lebanon adopted a new election law last year. The law changed the previous winnertakes-all system to a complicated sectarian-based proportional representation which awards the number of seats by the share of vote received. There are more than 500 candidates running in 15 districts around the country for the 128-seat parliament.
All eyes are on whether the voting on Sunday and the turnout can loosen the grip of an established political class on the country’s affairs. Few countries are as vulnerable
Divisive issues such as Hezbollah’s weapons and the controversy over its participation in regional conflicts are absent from the electoral campaigns Joseph Bahout, an analyst
to the Middle East’s mayhem as Lebanon, which has taken in a million refugees from the catastrophic war in neighbouring Syria.
Yet campaigning for the parliamentary election has timidly sidestepped the big issues, leaving many Lebanese expecting more of the same. It’s especially galling for Lebanese concerned a stilldominant Hezbollah could drag the country into a looming IranianIsraeli regional confrontation.
The vote is expected to be a test for the country’s Western-backed prime minister, Saad Hariri, and his Iran-backed militant opponent, Hezbollah, which is looking to tighten its grip and expand its presence in the 128-seat parliament — likely at Hariri’s expense.
Interior Minister Nouhad Mashnouk, a member of Hariri’s inner circle, said the election is not “a Sunni-Shia conflict but rather a conflict between a group that believes in a state and a nation, and another that has regional and Iranian leanings.”
The sides, however, can hardly govern effectively without each other and are expected to recreate the unity government that currently exists, which incorporates members of the militant group.
Most of the campaigning by more than 500 candidates has revolved around platforms of stability and economic growth, with many of Lebanon’s civil war-era political titans set to return, including Lebanon’s ageing Shia parliament speaker, Nabih Berri, a Hezbollah ally who has held the post for more than 25 years and who is virtually uncontested. Some warlords are passing on their seats to their sons, including Druze leader Walid Jumblatt.
“Divisive issues such as Hezbollah’s weapons and the controversy over its participation in regional conflicts are almost entirely absent from the electoral campaigns, indicating implicit acceptance of the party’s domestic hegemony,” wrote analyst Joseph Bahout in an article for the Carnegie Middle East Centre. —