Beirut: Although Lebanon boasts at least twenty political parties to give the appearance of full representation, in reality most play marginal roles in internal politics, even if the country is nominally a parliamentary democracy where the competition for ideas could add value.
At a time of intense bickering among party leaders to agree on a new electoral law that will govern the Spring 2017 parliamentary elections, President Michel Aoun is apparently poised to use his constitutional privileges to hamper the polls, precisely to nudge the parties into action.
Sources close to Aoun said the potential is available for the President to obstruct these elections since he is supposed to sign the decree that authorises them.
This mechanism, Aoun believes, will prevent parliament from extending its own term for a third time in a row.
He is apparently ready to back any new law (the hybrid or proportional representation system, for example), if the parties can settle on one.
For now, the bickering is over amending the current 1960 majoritarian election law, which divides seats among the country’s different religious sects.
Inasmuch as each and every party is led by powerful and charismatic personalities, sometimes the leaders of prominent families who prize their confessional identities above all else, it was not a surprise to witness the current roadblock. Ironically, most leaders claim that their “party” is multi-confessional, which may be accurate in a few cases, even if token participation does not make these groups tolerant.
In reality, political parties are little more than loose coalitions in the hands of powerful families that mobilise voters for local and parliamentary elections, whose objectives are to negotiate between and among clan leaders to propel their religiously defined and inclined candidates into office.
Charmingly, and despite recent changes, Lebanon remained a highly sectarian society.
Of course, representation in parliament reached a parity between Muslims and Christians (64 seats for each) under the terms of the Constitution as amended by the 1990 Ta’if Accords, though party coalitions seldom ushered in cohesive blocks. In fact, no single party has ever won more than 12.5 percent of the seats in parliament, and no coalition of parties has won more than 35 percent, which effectively translated into limited power for the parties themselves. Still, wily and rival political leaders honed survival skills as they displayed chameleon like qualities by aligning themselves in one constituency, and opposing each other in another.
In 2017, the leading parties include Amal and Hezbollah, overwhelmingly Shiite, the Phalange, Lebanese Forces and Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), mostly Christian, and the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), which is chiefly a Druze party. There are branches of pan-Arab secular parties, including the Ba‘ath and the Syrian Socialist National Party, along with a slew of smaller parties, most of which are drawn along sectarian lines.
Hezbollah, nominally an FPM ally, has repeatedly called for an electoral law based on proportional representation, something that Aoun must balance with demands made by other political parties, especially the Future Movement and the PSP, which have rejected the proposal.
The latter have argued that Hezbollah’s controversial arsenal of arms effectively prevented serious competition in regions where the Iran-backed party enjoyed supremacy.
Since what defined political parties in Lebanon more than any other characteristic is patronage, which translates into a relatively efficient model of “clientelism,” neither Aoun nor any other leader possessed the intrinsic capabilities to alter the system because political parties lacked ideological norms, with little or no programs in most cases.
The last parliamentary elections in Lebanon were held in 2009, under an updated electoral law mandated by the Doha Agreement.
It divided the country into 26 electoral districts and mandated that elections be held on a single day, rather than consecutive weekends. Lebanese political parties or, more accurately, Lebanon’s feudal political leaders seemed anxious to replicate that experiment in 2017.
