LEBANON’S ELECTION SURPRISE
The National
9/GLOBALBRIEFING/906099994/-1/SPORT
June 9 2009
UAE
After a victory for the Hizbollah-led opposition had been widely
anticipated, a constellation of factors tipped the balance in the
March 14 coalition’s favour bringing an end to the jinx of Western
support, at least for now.
An election-eve warning from Lebanon’s Maronite Christian patriarch who
warned that the country faced a threat to its existence may also have
been decisive in promoting fear of the Islamist group and its allies.
As The New York Times noted: "for the first time in a long time, being
aligned with the United States did not lead to defeat in the Middle
East. And since Lebanon has always been a critical testing ground,
that could mark a possibly significant shift in regional dynamics
with another major election, in Iran, just four days away.
"With Mr Obama’s speech on relations with Muslims still fresh in
Lebanese voters’ minds, analysts pointed to steps the administration
has taken since assuming office.
"Washington is now proposing talking to Hizbollah’s patrons, Iran
and Syria, rather than confronting them – a move that undermines
the group’s attempt to demonise the United States. The United States
is also no longer pressing its allies in the Lebanese government to
unilaterally disarm Hizbollah, which given the party’s considerable
remaining clout, could have provoked a crisis.
" ‘Lebanon is a telling case,’ said Osama Safa, director of the
Lebanese Center for Policy Studies here. ‘It is no longer relevant
for the extremists to use the anti-American card. It does look like
the US is moving onto something new.’ "
In an interview with Foreign Relations, Mohamad Bazzi said: "One
of the most important things to keep in mind is that Hizbollah
itself did not lose any of the seats that it had coming into this
election. The entire premise of this election was that Hizbollah’s
main Christian ally, General Michel Aoun, would be the one to pick
up more seats – that he would pick up more of the Christian-dominated
seats and therefore, this would give that alliance a shot at winning
the majority. Aoun did not do as well as expected; he did not pick up
more seats. So therefore this Hizbollah-led alliance did not win the
majority. We have a scenario now with a distribution of seats similar
to the current one we have. The March 14th coalition, the pro-Western
movement, has sixty-eight seats, Hizbollah and Aoun and their other
allies have fifty-seven seats, and it appears that there are three
independents who’ve won seats. Most likely these independents will ally
themselves with March 14th, so we might have a breakdown of seventy-one
to fifty-seven, which for Lebanon is a significant majority…
"I think US support played some role in the election results, but I
would be careful not to over dramatise the US role. I think in general
there is a better feeling in Lebanon about the Obama administration
than there was about the Bush administration. There’s perhaps less
of a stigma attached to being allied with the United States as the
March 14th coalition is allied with the United States. But the more
important factor in the Christian community seems to be the remarks by
the Maronite Christian patriarch, Nasrallah Sfeir, who on the eve of
the election, warned voters about what he called this attempt to change
Lebanon’s character and its Arab identity, which is a thinly-veiled
reference to Hizbollah and its main backer, Iran. So that might have
pushed some voters, some Christian voters, away from General Aoun
and his ally Hizbollah and might have convinced them to vote for the
March 14th faction. That intervention by Cardinal Sfeir was probably
much more important than anything that the United States had said."
Shortly before voters went to the polls, Reuters reported: "Lebanon’s
Maronite Christian patriarch said on Saturday his country faced a
threat to its existence, appearing to take sides against Hizbollah
on the eve of an election whose outcome will be decided by the
Christian vote.
"The influential Cardinal Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, who has already
warned of ‘mistakes’ were the Islamist group and its allies to win
the election, spoke of ‘a threat to the Lebanese entity and its Arab
identity.’ His remarks were reported by the National News Agency."
Joshua Landis considered what the election outcome will mean for
policy.
"Much depends on whether March 14 tries to rewrite Doha and get rid
of the blocking third in Lebanon’s cabinet, as Hariri said he would
do. He may feel obliged to carry through with this, or at the very
least, raise it as his initial battle cry, because his win was more
substantial than expected. My hunch is that any attempt to undo Doha
will threaten to take Lebanon back to the paralysis and dark days
of the pre-Doha era and will thus be abandoned. There is no stomach
for such extremism today – not in Washington, Riyadh, or in Damascus
or Tehran. The Obama era has changed things and Syria is waiting to
move ahead with the US.
"In many respects, Syria-US relations have been on hold, awaiting the
outcome of the June 7 elections. Now that elections are over business
can resume. The US, gratified at their results, can send Mitchell
to Damascus as a sign of magnanimity in victory. Washington will
be in a stronger position, but ironically, Damascus too may feel a
certain relief in the very highest halls of the foreign ministry. It
has avoided the complications of an Hizbollah win, which could have
strained already bad relations with the US even further."
In an analysis of the breakdown of voting, Lebanon’s Daily Star
reported: "Monolithic sectarian voting by Lebanon’s Sunnis and
Shiites decided the results of Sunday’s general elections, upending
conventional wisdom that the country’s Christians would determine
the vote’s winner, a number of analysts told The Daily Star on
Monday. Christian-majority districts remained the crucial electoral
battlegrounds, but the unexpected weight of Sunni voters in the Zahle,
Koura and Beirut 1 precincts swung the poll in favour of the March 14
alliance, which won 71 of 128 Parliament seats, said Hilal Khashan,
head of the department of political studies and public administration
at the American University of Beirut. Meanwhile, Shiite voters in
the Christian-majority regions of Baabda, Jbeil and Jezzine – as well
as Armenian electors in the Metn – clinched resounding victories for
the lists of the March 8 coalition’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM),
Khashan added.
" ‘The outcome of the election did surprise most of us,’ he said,
adding that the final tally also revealed the absence of reliable
polling information about voter preferences. ‘Contrary to expectations,
it was not the Christian vote that determined the outcome – it was
the Sunni and Shiite voters. It was the Sunni vote that ensured the
defeat of the [FPM head] Michel Aoun electoral list.’
"The nearly uniform sectarian voting patterns also uncovered a
deep democracy deficit in the elections, trumpeted regionally and
internationally as a model for the largely undemocratic Middle East,
said Shafik Masri, professor of constitutional law.
" ‘We can hardly speak of a Lebanese voter – we can speak of sect
voters,’ he said, adding that the absence of voters supporting
independent candidates or casting blank ballots also underscored the
disturbing lesson. ‘This actually deformed the individual right [to
vote] into a crystallized sectarian voting. The voting adjective is
"collective," but not "individual." ‘ "
In Forbes, Lionel Laurent wrote: "Judging by this election, it
takes fear and money to promote democracy in Lebanon. Government
supporters feared that the Shiite Muslim militant group Hizbollah,
seen as an armed puppet of its backers in Syria and Iran, would win
a parliamentary majority with its own allies and spark a national
crisis. The Hariri bloc knew how to exploit this fear on the campaign
trail when it claimed that a victory for the Hizbollah-led opposition
would lead to a tripartite sharing of government and administrative
posts between Shia Muslims, Sunni Muslims and Christians. They are
currently only shared two ways, between Muslims and Christians.
"A related fear was also how the international community would react to
a Hizbollah victory. American Vice-President Joe Biden visited Lebanon
last month to say in no uncertain terms that a Hizbollah-led government
should not expect American aid to flow as freely as before. US ally
Saudi Arabia is also a strong financial backer of Lebanon, supporting
Sunni interests in the deeply-fragmented country. And although Israel
failed to bomb Hizbollah out of existence in the 2006 Lebanon War,
an electoral victory for the Shia group might heighten the chances
of another conflict.
"Then there was money. Cash came in handy when flying Lebanese
expatriates into the country to cast their vote on Sunday, a tactic
which all sides reportedly dabbled in. Tales abound of parties buying
$700 plane tickets for citizens abroad, with Iran, Syria and rival
Saudi Arabia reported to be contributing to a $1 billion travel pot in
total splashed across the country. Evidently March 14 still managed to
tip the balance in this arena, with Hizbollah’s main Christian ally,
Michel Aoun, failing to tear crucial votes away from Christian allies
of Hariri like the right-wing Phalangists."
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
