I will have some stories from yesterday in the coming days, but first, a round up.
The ruling March 14 coalition, which is pro-Western and aligned with the United States and Saudi Arabia, has retained its majority. This comes as something of a surprise, since most political analysts and pollsters (or was it most foreign journalists?) were predicting a slight advantage for the opposition, a Hezbollah and Aounist alliance.
The election appears to have been carried out without major incident. For the first time in modern history, Lebanon voted in a Parliament in a single day (previous elections have been spread out over weeks), and while there were some reports of frustratingly long waits, the government appears to have adapted to this well. Sharek961, a community journalism website and Twitter feed, broadcast news of small scuffles throughout the day, and other bloggers, like Deen Sharp, Beirut Spring, and the inimitable Qifa Nabki, maintained fascinating running posts. We’ll have to await the final reports by the election observers, both international and domestic, but by and large it seems like the election was a procedural success.
By last night, fireworks burst throughout the city, although the celebrations seemed somewhat muted, at least compared with my expectations of huge parties and celebratory gunfire in the wake of a big Hezbollah win. (The pro-majority Lebanese Forces were a notable exception — all evening they broadcast Wagnerian fight songs from a small square near Sofil that could be heard throughout Ashrafiyeh, and made eating dinner anywhere nearby slightly unpleasant.) The city has been pretty empty, however, because Lebanese election law requires that people vote in the village they are from, not where they live, so many people had left town.
Obviously there will be a lot of analysis in the next few days and weeks, but there is still plenty of intrigue to come. In my first week in Beirut, I was told by a staffer in the UN’s main office here that the real potential for trouble would start after the election, when the two sides have to come together to form a government. (We journalists love this sort of prognostication; it’s like our version of “stay tuned: after these messages we’ll be right back.”) A couple of days ago, Paul Salem of the Carnegie Foundation for Middle East Peace laid out a vision of the way forward from this election, saying that “the two coalitions should be encouraged to form a coalition government with a strong role for the president” — a notion that has been reinforced both before the election, by the Number 2 in Hezbollah, Naim Qassem, and after the election, by the powerful Druze leader Walid Jumblatt.
There were some people in Beirut, myself included, who thought that a March 8 victory might lead to a better chance of this — M8 would have an underwhelming majority, and a wary international community, and thus find itself unable and unwilling to dominate the country; M14 would be a forceful opposition element, with strong international ties and a claim, still, to much of Lebanon’s public image worldwide; and ultimately much power would fall to a centrist bloc, managed by the relatively independent President, Michel Sleiman, and which would grow in number and influence over time. (Of course, this is optimistic on my part, and depends on my faith in the many assertions of Hezbollah that they had no intention of unilaterally ruling Lebanon.)
Instead, with a reported 14 seat majority, the M14 alliance may find itself swayed to claim a major political mandate (in normal circumstances, it would certainly have the right), and it’s not known how Hezbollah (which possesses the bulk of the military might in the country) and FPM (which possesses much of the popular discontent) will react. There are stalemates (like the situation over the past year, with a tendentiously appointed government and formal veto power in the hands of the minority — yet it still functioned), and there are stalemates — like the sit-ins that recently froze the country for two years. Will one of those emege from this election?
Meanwhile, Hezbollah’s loss (if it can truly be called that — all 11 of their parliamentary candidate won their races) will be a relief to the many Western observers who saw their rise as a grave threat to world order. But I tend to agree with those who don’t think that input from the international community played a significant role in deciding this election. I wasn’t particularly thrilled to see so much hyperventiliating from abroad about a Hezbollah victory in the day or two before the election — not least since it contravened (in spirit if not practice) a well-intentioned Lebanese law banning electioneering in the 24 hours before June 7th. On Friday, an unidentified American official told Al Hayat that the election was a choice between “independence and sovereignty” and “violence and extremism.” On Saturday, Jeffrey Feltman suggested pedantically that the Lebanese were “too intelligent” to believe that a Hezbollah alliance victory would not undermine Lebanon’s relationship with the U.S. And yesterday, the Israeli Interior Minister declared that if Hezbollah won, Lebanon would become “a terror state.” (More influential, in all likelihood, was the last minute intervention of the Maronite Patriarch Nasrallah Boutros Sfeir, who cautioned against a Hezbollah victory on Saturday. His statement was in actual violation of the election law, and was technically banned from being rebroadcast.) Those statements were clearly genuine, and perhaps they added up to something, but from where I sit they sounded didactic, and like a trick out of an ugly campaign playbook.
Tags: Election Observers, FPM, Hezbollah, Lebanon Elections, March 14, Media, Michel Aoun
Lets hope we go by the soap opera after the election into sincere discussion on priorities, and settle for a least-enforced summer holiday.
[...] Sean’s recent writings, along with Ms. Tee over at B-side Beirut, and Josh Hersh’s new blog. This POMED round-up also has a lot of worthwhile links on the post-election [...]