POLITICS-LEBANON: Lebanese Voting Again

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Dilip Hiro

LONDON, May 31 1998 (IPS) - In their eighth year of peace since the end of a bitter civil war, Lebanese voters trooped to the polls again Sunday enjoyinbg a right rare for an Arab state – electing local councillors in 700 districts by direct vote.

Voting began one week ago in the southern Beirut suburbs, Jounieh and the Mount Lebanon regions, and continued elsewhere in the country today and the remaining contituencies will vote on Jun. 7 and Jun. 14.

Early results from last Sunday were striking: both Christian opposition and Islamic radical groups scored significant victories over government- backed candidates.

After boycotting all elections in the country for years, the Christian opposition parties returned to active campaigning, with Dory Chamoun, son of the late Lebanese president Camille Chamoun, returned as mayor of his home town of Deir el-Kamar. And in the poverty stricken southern suburbs of Beirut, the Islamic Hezbollah defeated candidates backed by a powerful alliance between Sunni Muslim prime minister Rafik Hariri and Shi’a leader Nabih Berri, speaker of the Lebanese parliament.

That vote was as much a rejection of the Lebanese millionaire elite’s plans for the southern Beirut slums. Hariri’s planned 500 million dollar reconstruction programme for the area, a swathe of magnificent hotels and a major airport development in the district — all rejected by the thousands of poor Shi’a war refugees who presently live in its shattered apartment blocks.

More shocks are expected as the weekend elections roll through to next month to take in the valleys of the eastern Beka’a and the trio of cities — central Beirut, Tripoli and Sidon — that are home to nearly two-thirds of Lebanon’s 3.3 million citizens. But several features of this democratic exercise are remarkable; it is being held after a long gap, of 35 years and there is a plethora of candidates, a substantial minority of them women. Participation is exceptionally high; an estimated 75 percent of the electorate turned out to vote on Sunday.

Most uniquely, unlike other elections here, there is no pre-set quota of seats to share out between the country’s 19 major religious denominations. And though national leaders Hariri and Berri have promised not to influence the poll directly, the local elections are viewed as a dry run for a parliamentary poll due in two years.

This is so partly because the 1996 general election was boycotted by right-wing Christians, who are participating in the current elections. Secondly, the newly elected councillors and the mayors they select to head each council, will create ‘electoral keys’ that will control a bloc of votes in the next parliamentary election.

While the ballot is being held according to an old electoral law, the campaign has been conducted in a manner that does not fit into the traditional Lebanese way of politics, often centred around a handful of top families, both Christian and Muslim. In normal circumstances influential families would act in unison to maintain their power. But due to the 15-year civil war, two invasions by Israel, internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, and large-scale emigration, especially by Christians, the old pattern of politics has largely disappeared.

As such the present election campaign has seen family members pitted against one another, an unprecedented phenomenon. Even in the poor Shi’a areas of south Beirut, some influential family members chose to throw in their lot with the Islamic radicals of the Hezbollah rather than back their ‘natural’ representatives, Hariri, a Sunni Muslim, and Berri, a Shi’a.

Berri and Hariri’s joint bid to keep the Hezbollah out of power in south Beirut appears to have failed, partly due to the support of these dissident families.

The opposition to Hariri, a fabulously rich construction magnate, is particularly vocal in Beirut, where it is often hard to distinguish between the state policies on post-war reconstruction and the activities of the giant construction companies doing the work, most of which he has a hand in.

Salim Hoss, an eminent predecessor of Hariri, says that he would encourage the councillors of Beirut municipality to acquire supervisory role over the reconstruction plans over which currently there is no control by public authorities. Even in Hariri’s home town of Sidon, a leftist alliance called Democratic National Convergence, has emerged to oppose his nominees.

Not surprisingly, Hariri is reported to be investing lot of his time and money to ensure that the candidates loyal to his local and national policies get elected. Yet the vote is also bringing out the opposition elsewhere in Lebanon. Despite denials from Hariri and Berri, the lines have already been drawn between the political establishment that they represent and the opposition, whether Muslim or Christian.

Finally these elections, the results freed of the constraints of religious quotas, will also give a fresh measure of the changes in the religious composition of Lebanon’s population since the last official census of 1932.

According to the amended 1990 constitution, the 128 seats in parliament are divided equally between Christians and Muslims; and further sub-divided into Muslim sects (Sunni 27, Shia 27, Druze 8, Alawi 2) and Christian sects (Maronite Catholics 34, Greek Orthodox 14, and so on).

Before 1990 the religious carve-up was six Christians to five Muslims. This was based on the figures of the 1932 census, the last one. Since 1943 the constitutions has specified that the republic’s president must be Maronite Catholic, its prime minister Sunni Muslim and parliamentary speaker Shi’a Muslim. Now the unofficial estimates put the Christian population at 25-35 percent. That makes the constitutional stipulation of a Christian president increasingly untenable.

Since the local elections are not being held within the sectarian straight-jacket, with a candidate winning by the sheer size of his or her vote, the cumulative outcome will provide a fairly reliable pointer towards the actual religious composition of Lebanon in 66 years.

Many Christians are apprehensive. As al-Masira, a Christian magazine put it diplomatically: ‘The hidden realities of the sectarian demography will endanger co-existence (between Muslims and Christians)’.

Whatever, for a while at least, Lebanon looks likely to keep its multi-party democratic history, begun in 1926. Civil war brought that tradition to a shuddering halt. On Sunday it was proven to have life still in it.