Outsiders face uphill battle in rare election
BEIRUT — With campaigning in full swing for Lebanon’s first national election in nine years, parliament candidate Laury Haytayan was trying to rope in a passersby with her message: She and other political outsiders are running in a new coalition that aims to be an alternative to the country’s traditional powers.
“Hello! Are you registered to vote in Beirut?” she asked as she canvassed the capital’s Ashrafieh neighborhood one recent afternoon.
Some acknowledged they were not.
“That’s no problem,” said Haytayan, as she handed out brochures about the coalition, Kulna Watani — “We Are All Patriots,” in Arabic. Explaining that it was a break with the politicians who have run Lebanon for decades since the 19751990 civil war, she urged them to vote for it in their own districts.
Watani is hoping to ride a wave of discontent over the country’s failing public services, its daily water and power cuts, and its pervasive corruption to create an independent bloc in parliament.
But short on money and campaigning to an electorate doubtful that change is even possible, it is unlikely to win more than a handful of seats in Sunday’s parliamentary election.
“We are going to the streets and meeting lots of people who say to us, ‘We can’t change anything in Lebanon,’ ” the 42-year-old Haytayan said. “Their experience is right because every time they vote for the same individuals and same people and same political class, because there was no alternative. But today, we created an alternative.”
Pierre Choueiry, 27, said he agreed it was time for a change, but wouldn’t promise his vote. He said he thought the Lebanese Forces, a former Christian militia during the civil war, was needed to protect Lebanon’s Christian population.
Philippe Aoun, who greeted Haytayan with a smile at his hair salon, said he was voting for the party of incumbent President Michel Aoun. He said he was confident Aoun, who has been in office for 18 months, would steer the country out of its many crises. The two are not related.
Fielding 66 candidates in nine of Lebanon’s 15 election districts, Watani is the largest coalition of political outsiders and independents to run for office since the civil war.
Many are civic activists who rose to prominence as organizers of protests over a 2015 trash collection crisis that left garbage in the streets for months and laid bare the extent of the public sector mismanagement plaguing Lebanon. And many were active well before that, struggling to chip away at the complex political patronage networks that have kept the country’s civil war-era warlords and their sons in power since 1990.