BEIRUT —
Hezbollah’s opponents might rejoice at their loss
of majority in parliament but Lebanon’s packed political calendar now sets the
stage for protracted deadlocks at best or violence at worst.
اضافة اعلان
Sunday’s polls passed without any major incident, in
itself an achievement in a country which has a history of political violence
and is suffering its worst crisis since the 1975–1990 civil war.
Iran-backed
Hezbollah is a major political and military force, described by its supporters
a bulwark against enemy Israel and by its detractors as a state within a state
whose continued existence prevents any kind of democratic change in Lebanon.
Hezbollah and its allies lost the clear majority
they had in the outgoing parliament, despite a flurry of televised addresses by
the Shiite group’s leader Hassan Nasrallah in the week running up to the vote.
The biggest winners were the Christian Lebanese
Forces party and new faces born of a 2019 secular protest movement, all of whom
have a clear stance against Hezbollah.
“Old guard parties will seek to assert their
political dominance in the face of the reformists who have entered parliament
for the first time,” said analyst Lina Khatib, head of the Middle East and
North Africa Program at
Chatham House.
Speaker election
As of May 22, after the
current assembly’s mandate expires, the new lawmakers will have 15 days to pick
a speaker, a position
Nabih Berri has held since 1992 and is not intent on
leaving despite reaching the age of 84.
By convention, Lebanon’s prime minister position is
reserved for a Sunni Muslim, the presidency goes to a Maronite Christian, and
the post of speaker to a Shiite Muslim.
Berri is a deeply polarizing figure but all
Shiite seats in parliament were won by Hezbollah and the veteran speaker’s own Amal
party, which rules out the emergence of a consensual candidacy.
The election will be a first test of how willing
Hezbollah’s opponents are to challenge the Shiite tandem.
The leader of the Tehran-backed movement’s
parliamentary group set the tone as early as Monday when he warned rivals
against becoming “shields for the Israelis”.
His words were a reply to
Samir Geagea, whose
Lebanese Forces have championed the case for disarming Hezbollah, and had laid down
the gauntlet by vowing never to support Berri’s re-election or join a unity
government.
The new polarization of Lebanese politics raises
fears of a repeat of deadly violence that broke out in Beirut last year between
Hezbollah-aligned fighters and FL supporters.
The L’Orient-Le Jour daily stressed in an analysis
that Hezbollah’s parliament majority in recent years had enabled it “not to
resort to terror to impose its decisions and preserve its red lines”.
Government formation
“The risk of a total stalemate
is real, deadlocks are a Lebanese specialty,” said Daniel Meier, a France-based
researcher.
In Lebanon’s unique and chaotic brand of sectarian
consensus politics, forming a government can take months, even when the country
faces multiple emergencies.
Between the two latest elections, two out of four
years were spent under a caretaker government with limited powers as the
country’s political barons haggled over cabinet line-ups.
The latest government, led by billionaire
Najib Mikati, has only been in place since September 2021 after a 13-month vacuum.
It was billed a mostly technocratic government
tasked with guiding Lebanon to recovery, but each minister was endorsed by one
of Lebanon’s perennial heavyweights.
Whether any of the 13 MPs labeled as representing
the interests of the 2019 anti-establishment uprising would consider joining a
coalition government with that same establishment is doubtful.
“There is change in the balance of power but this
will not translate in a program for change because despite everything Hezbollah
keeps its veto power,” analyst Sami Nader said.
A quick fix would be to keep the Mikati government
in a caretaker capacity until the presidential election.
Presidential election
That is the last but not the
least of the major hurdles in the institutional calendar.
Due by the end of the year, the new parliament’s
pick for a president to succeed Michel Aoun, who will be 89 by then, was
further complicated by the latest election.
He groomed his son-in-law
Gebran Bassil for years
but the electoral surge of the Lebanese Forces, the Christian rivals of Aoun’s
Free Patriotic Movement, is a spanner in the family works.
Army chief Joseph Aoun has already been tipped as an
alternative but talks could drag on.
“Probably we will have a long period of stalemate in
the parliament,” said Joseph Bahout, a professor at the American University of
Beirut.
He predicted a tunnel of institutional deadlocks could delay
reforms requested by the International Monetary Fund for a critically needed
rescue package until the spring of 2023.
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