Beirut: Typical of Lebanese who seldom await official results to boast achievements, Hezbollah deputy chief Shaikh Naim Qasim called a press conference and announced the success of the party’s lists in Baalbek and Brital. No official results were released as of Monday afternoon.
Qasim, however, declared that these elections “succeeded in breaking the obstruction that plagued the state and that [the government was] able to successfully complete the electoral process”, which was an interesting avowal since few party members backed the state.
At 2am on Monday, the Head of the “Beirutis” municipal electoral list, Jamal Itani, also announced that his list won the capital’s municipal elections, while Interior Minister Nouhad Al Mashnouq was jubilant that “the Lebanese proved that they deserve freedom and democracy”.
On Sunday, the first leg of four weekly polls ended in what were largely peaceful municipal and mayoral elections, even if commentators lamented poor voter turnout, 20.14 per cent in Beirut and 49.02 per cent in the Bekaa Valley.
As expected, establishment-backed electoral lists scored victories even if a major media campaign by “Beirut Madinati” (Beirut My City), a grass-roots secular coalition of academics, artists, technocrats, engineers and activists, in other words, members of civil society who intended to inject fresh blood in the ossified system, failed to make inroads. This illustrated the traditional grip enjoyed by political parties who loathed any idea of surrendering their decades-old clasp of the state.
If Beirut and most of Bekaa voted for established parties, a fiercely contested election battle in Zahle produced equally determined results. The predominantly Christian town in the heart of the Bekaa saw a coalition of three key groups, the Free Patriotic Movement, the Lebanese Forces and the Phalange Party, which won the majority of the city’s 21-member municipal council.
This victory dealt a setback to two rival lists, one backed by Myriam Skaff, head of the Popular Bloc and wife of the late pro-Syrian strongman Elias Skaff, and another supported by an equally pro-Syrian official, deputy Nicolas Fattoush.
Television broadcasts showed several breaches in Zahle where fistfights and vote buying were all too visible even if 20,000 Internal Security Forces and Lebanese Army troops maintained order. Security was extremely heavy outside schools and other locations transformed into polling stations, with officers assisting handicapped voters manoeuvre through stairs and other inaccessible facilities.
In the event, the electoral process was marred by a few noteworthy incidents, as Skaff and Fattoush supporters brawled in Zahle’s Mar Elias neighbourhood with opponents, which prompted the army to intervene. A few apartments in the Hawsh Al Umara neighbourhood were raided by ISF troops after claims that the lists backed by Skaff and Fattoush were buying votes there.
Although the Interior Minister reported that no evidence of any vote buying operations were found during the raids, Al Mashnouq recanted when videos of money exchanging hands were shown on television. He declared that “one person was arrested on charges of vote buying in Zahle” and that “authorities were probing a list of individuals suspected of paying electoral bribes in specific areas”.
The festive day was marked by comical moments as Progressive Socialist Party leader Waleed Junblatt took to Twitter to post a sarcastic comment after the Future Movement’s Sa’ad Hariri mistakenly cast a municipal poll ballot in a box for the mayoral elections. “Even Shaikh Sa’ad is not convinced of the ‘Beirutis’ List,” wrote Junblatt though he quickly deleted his tweet.
In the event, Junblatt was not the only individual to enjoy himself, as most streets donned folkloric garb. In the capital, thousands of Beirut Madinati volunteers, mostly young men and women, handed motorists near polling stations copies of their list. Although 650 complaints were apparently recorded, it was too soon to determine whether any of them were actual voters or whether they were carefully planted troublemakers to prevent the 476,021 eligible voters in Beirut (distributed among 1,646 polling stations in the capital), 308,717 voters in the Bekaa (1,158 stations), and 303,102 voters in the Baalbek and Hermel districts (1,101 stations), from casting ballots.
Observers who were surprised by the low-turn out provided various explanations, including the fact that many of those registered in Beirut were out of the country, working overseas to support their families.
With these victories, however, establishment politicians like Hariri and Hezbollah achieved their declared goals: the first to consecrate equal power sharing between Muslims and Christians, and the second to deny any other Shiite candidate or group the opportunity to challenge it.
The second stage of the municipal election will occur in Mount Lebanon on May 15, followed by South Lebanon and Nabatiyyah on May 22, and North Lebanon and Akkar on May 29.
