LEBANON’S LARGEST PARTIES SET TO LOSE OUT IN POLL
▶ Druze Hezbollah ally loses the seat he has held for nearly 30 years
Partial results announced by Lebanon’s Interior Ministry from this week’s parliamentary elections suggest allies of Hezbollah have lost seats, with the Christian Lebanese Forces and independent candidates expected to make up ground.
The Lebanese Forces, longtime critics of Hezbollah and Iran’s influence in Lebanon, gained at least 10 seats, most of them at the expense of their Christian rival Free Patriotic Movement.
Lebanese Forces spokesman Marc Saad told The National that he expected the party to win at least 20 seats. In 2018, the party won 15.
If confirmed, that would mean the Lebanese Forces have overtaken the Hezbollah-allied FPM as the biggest Christian party in the 128-seat Lebanese Parliament.
According to Reuters, the FPM claimed it has taken at least 16 seats, down from 18 four years ago.
While he has urged supporters to wait for the results, Gebran Bassil has already accused Israel and the US of undermining his campaign and the Lebanese Forces of buying votes.
The FPM has been the biggest Christian party in parliament since its founder – and Mr Bassil’s father-in-law – President Michel Aoun, returned from exile in France in 2005.
Simon Abi Ramia, an FPM member who was re-elected in Mount Lebanon, said that “maybe because we have the President of the Republic and were the bigger bloc, people are putting the responsibility upon us because of the terrible economic situation and their suffering.”
Mr Abi Ramia was referring to Lebanon’s economic meltdown, which started in 2019. The UN’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights recently criticised Lebanon’s ruling elite for causing the crisis and doing little to find solutions.
“Political leadership is completely out of touch with reality, including with the desperation they’ve created by destroying people’s lives”, rapporteur Olivier De Schutter said last week.
Election turnout was 41 per cent – eight points lower than in 2018 – suggesting the traditional sectarian parties that have shared power for decades failed to mobilise supporters.
Elsewhere, eye surgeon Elias Jradeh, 55, is set to become the first opposition MP elected in south Lebanon taking the Orthodox Christian seat, a region dominated by Hezbollah and its ally Amal.
Dr Jradeh was running against Assaad Hardan, a Hezbollah ally and head of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party who has been in Parliament since 1992.
Mr Jradeh’s supporters celebrated at his home on Sunday evening, chanting slogans such as “revolution” and “Hasbaya, rise up,” in reference to his home town.
The chants echoed slogans used during months-long nationwide protests in 2019 triggered by the country’s economic woes.
The campaign manager of Firas Hamdan, a Druze candidate on Mr Jradeh’s opposition list, said they also expected a win, but were waiting for official results for their district to be announced.
Yesterday’s results confirmed that several prominent Parliament members had lost seats, including deputy speaker Elie Ferzli, who is backed by Hezbollah.
He was initially elected in 1992, Lebanon’s first parliamentary election after the 1975-1990 civil war.
Talal Arslan, the Hezbollah-backed Druze politician who leads the Lebanese Democratic Party, lost a seat he had held for 30 years, a Hezbollah official and the newcomer’s campaign manager told Reuters, citing preliminary results.
Local media reports indicate that he was defeated by university professor Marc Daou of Takaddom, a new non-sectarian political party
Despite the setback, Hezbollah and Amal could retain all 27 Shiite parliament seats.
The election was scrutinised at home and abroad, coming after the 2019 protests and economic collapse as well as the Beirut port explosion on August 4, 2020 that killed more than 200 people. Missing from this year’s elections was two-times prime minister Saad Hariri and his Future Movement, long seen as a bastion of the Sunni community in Lebanon.
Mr Hariri’s withdrawal of himself and his party from the election led to some supporters abstaining and holding a pool party to publicise their decision.
A video of people playing in the pool went viral on Twitter.
Mr Hariri tweeted yesterday that his decision to boycott the election was “correct”.
The withdrawal, however,
left a void in Sunni-dominated Tripoli, which is Lebanon’s second-largest city.
Mr Hariri withdrew from politics in January. He blamed political compromise for his failures, including his acceptance of Mr Aoun’s election.
According to preliminary results for the North II district, the two front-runners were lists led by Dignity Movement leader Faisal Karami – although it appeared Mr Karami could miss out on a seat – and Ashraf Rifi, a former Hariri rival.
“I’m feeling a lot of responsibility on a national level and I’m hoping I’m at the same level of this responsibility,” Mr Rifi told The National on Sunday night.
“The first priority is to relieve Lebanon from the domination of Iran and Hezbollah. The second is to provide the youth in Tripoli with jobs and better opportunities,”
But the former Internal Security Forces chief was forced to take to the streets to calm some of his supporters when they fired automatic weapons into the air in celebration.
With Lebanon’s poverty rate hovering around 80 per cent, it is hard to find a Lebanese person satisfied with the state of their country and those who lead it. In a functioning democracy, this anger would be taken to the ballot box, in an endeavour to promote orderly politics over violence. It is also a metric of trust, in both the government that is to be voted in and the one that should step aside if it loses. It is also, perhaps above all else, a sign of confidence in the institutions that should steward the whole process fairly.
A lack of confidence that any of this will happen is why so many Lebanese people have stayed away from this year’s elections, the final results of which are expected this week. In-country turnout was 41 per cent, down by almost 10 per cent from the last election in 2018. Many supporters of former prime minister Saad Hariri boycotted the vote, heeding his call to stay away from the ballot box.
Even those that did turn up to the voting booth expressed a sense of dejection. “We tried people before, but we have nothing. I voted before, and I vote again to change the people I voted for before, because they didn’t do anything to help me,” voter Abdel Qadir Sawaf told The National. In a sign of how bad the situation has become, images circulated of ballots being tallied up in pitch-black darkness. Lebanon has suffered from power cuts for years.
But the vote is not without significance, nor is it inconsequential. Some view it as an important chance to express anger peacefully after four years that have seen a terrible decline in living standards and basic services. Limited hope is being placed in a new generation of opposition MPs. Early signs indicate that some of them might have done well. In Lebanon’s broken system, what appears to be a dent in the number of seats for Hezbollah’s allies is also consequential. For example, the Lebanese Forces party has gained ground, at the expense of Gebran Bassil, President of the Free Patriotic Movement and a key Hezbollah ally.
The question is whether this new expression of public discontent can do anything to alter a status quo that for so many years has been unalterable.
Indeed, there are now fears that a decline in support for Hezbollah and its allies could lead to a standstill in forming a government.
Hezbollah has never been afraid to block progress when it does not suit its objectives. A blow to the popularity of the worst offenders in Lebanon’s broken politics might be a welcome reminder that elections have some effect – and perhaps could have real clout one day – but if the long-term result is simply another stalemate of the kind that has crippled Lebanon for many months, this year’s very modest victory could soon look to be entirely Pyrrhic.
Even with a new government, Lebanon’s problems are now so ingrained that it will be difficult to change much quickly. So far, those pushing for a new type of politics are tempering their hopes. “Listen, we’re not going to get electricity overnight,” candidate Nohad Yazbeck told The National. “We know what we’re up against. We are not selling an illusion.”