Lebanon: Symbolic Victory
By ISN Security Watch staff for ISN
Lebanon's anti-Syrian March 14 coalition has emerged with an impressive if largely symbolic election victory.
This parliamentary preeminence will likely be rendered pragmatically irrelevant by the overwhelming imperative for a unity government to provide calm and recuperation from recent crises.
The extent of the March 14 victory over the political opposition (71 seats to 57) came as something of a surprise given that many analysts foresaw a hung parliament or victory for Hizbollah and its allies, organized in the pro-Syrian March 8 coalition.
Speaking to ISN Security Watch, Professor Hilal Khashan from the American University of Beirut said, "The elections don't change anything on the ground. True, March 14 won a majority but this majority can't be translated into real political assets because Lebanon is governed by accommodation," referring to the need for all sides to compromise within the pan-sectarian governance structure.
Confessional system
Here it is important to note that the Lebanese parliament is elected on a confessional model with the legislature's 128 seats divvied up on the basis of a 64-64 split between Christians and Muslims.
The further division of each religion's parliamentary representation along the lines of 18 recognized confessional communities leads to a rather bizarre situation in which a voter may cast his or her ballot (each constituency returns a varying number of MPs) in an electoral district for representatives of other sects. This fact was important in deciding the results of a number of tight races on Sunday.
International Crisis Group's Sahar Atrache explained to ISN Security Watch that the existence of a large Sunni constituency in one of the key mixed districts had a major impact on the March 14 sweep of the electorate: "Sunni really played the role of swing [voters] in Zahle."
The current electoral system is intended more as a means for maintaining peaceful coexistence than as an expression of popular will, artificially suppressing the vote of Muslims generally and Shia in particular.
This and the movement's effective maintenance of parallel security, governance and socio-religious support systems are crucial to understanding Hizbollah's eschewal of a direct leadership role in the Lebanese government. The Shia movement stood only 11 candidates in this week's poll – all in safe seats.
Christians decide
With the results in a majority of the country's 26 electoral districts effectively decided before polling began, through the predominance of specific sectarian parties or candidates in local areas, this election turned on the Christian vote.
While avowedly secularist, preeminent Maronite leader Michel Aoun's Free Patriotic Movement (FPM/March 8), emerged as by far the strongest of the Christian parties in the 2005 elections before unexpectedly reaching a formal understanding with Hizbollah in 2006, joining the March 8 coalition.
FPM involvement in the 2006-2008 protests against the narrow March 14 government gave an important pan-sectarian legitimacy to the opposition struggle.
On Sunday, March 14 Christian candidates held their own in or swept a number of key districts, such as Batroun and Koura, a crucial factor in the overall March 14 victory.
Atrache said that while Aoun won in key districts such as Jbeil, Keserwan and Baabda "after all the results it was clear that it was the Christians of 14 March that won the real victory."
Aoun may have suffered at the polls through aligning himself too closely with Syria and Hizbollah. He visited Damascus in December, holding repeated talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, and has appeared to act as an apologist for the maintenance of Hizbollah's armed wing.
"The outcome of Aoun's electoral tickets was not impressive," Khashan said, adding, "for the most part he was able to win outside his areas [only] thanks to the Shiite vote."
Despite the poll reversals, the FPM may yet emerge as an important player both in the necessary negotiation of Lebanese-Syrian relations and in deciding the political future of the March 8 coalition.
Fingers in the pie
With its convoluted sectarian divisions, Lebanon has long served as a battleground for regional power plays and the proxy acting out of wider tensions.
The importance of the March 14 election victory lies, in large part, in the fact that it prevents a potential crisis in relations with Saudi Arabia and the US that may have occurred through a sudden shift in Lebanese government positions towards Iran and Syria.
Millions were purportedly pumped into the election campaigns of the competing blocs by Iran and Saudi Arabia.
The US also sought influence with US Vice President Joseph Biden's visit and Assistant Secretary of State for Near East Affairs Jeffery Feltman external pagearguing in an interview just before the polls that it was naive to assume that the election result would not impact on Lebanese relations with the US, before going on to directly attack Aoun.
"The Lebanese elections may be more significant at the regional level than in Lebanon itself," Khashan noted.
"If the March 8 were to [have] won, then the Obama administration would have had to deal with increased pressure from Israeli Prime Minister [Binyamin] Netanyahu to give priority to Israel's security concerns," he said.
Horse trading
The election result provides an important confirmation of the cementing of established voting patterns that, should the March 14 succeed in maintaining coherence, could have a long term impact.
March 14 has made it clear that it will not risk a repeat of the 2006-2008 governance crisis, through rejecting a national unity government, but is rhetorically opposed to granting the opposition a veto over key government decisions.
Whether both blocs will remain monolithic through the horse-trading of the coalition formation process is unclear.
"In Lebanon coalitions take place on an ad hoc basis so I don't feel that the composition of March 14 is lasting," Khashan said, adding that he did not expect defections from March 14 to the March 8 bloc.
With the crises of recent years receding in importance, there are some indications that individual March 14 movements or members may seek to distance themselves from the bloc out of concern at the maintenance of the current partisan political reality.
"Before the election we were really expecting realignment towards the president," Atrache said, referring to efforts by President Michel Suleiman to create a centrist bloc through which he could guide the legislative process away from stalemate.
"In these elections I would say that the president did not have very good results so I do not know if he is able really to have this centrist bloc," she concluded.
With a centrist faction unlikely to emerge, a national unity government in which Hizbollah and allies hold a veto in cabinet over annual budgets and other key decisions, through a one-third plus one share of cabinet portfolios, looks set to reemerge.
The impact of the same in stymieing good governance is clear, but for the moment the absence of conflict is perhaps more important than reform.