Back to the future in Lebanon?
Hezbollah is dealt a blow, so is reform or violence just around the corner?
This is the latest in my series, chronicling elections around the world in this epiphanal year of 2022. Already we have had Hungary, Slovenia and France in Europe, the Philippines in Asia. Today, it’s Lebanon, with far-reaching implications for the greater Middle East and beyond. Kenya will be electing its president and parliament in September, as will Brazil in October, Liberia next year, yet already plunged into controversy. And of course, there's the United States off-year elections in November which will set America on its own course domestically and around the world. Continue to watch this space for the latest as nations choose their leaders. And there'll be a host of other compelling tales from hither and yon. On Saturday, I'm back in France chronicling the campaign for France's parliamentary elections and a real sense of just what hand the Macron government will be dealt for the next five years. Meanwhile, today, it's Lebanon.
The voters of Lebanon seem to have delivered an important message. They have had enough of the chaos, the violence, the corruption that has taken their nation to the brink of a failed state by virtually every metric.
Results of the first parliamentary election since a series of catastrophic events in Lebanon has dealt Hezbollah, designated a terrorist group by the U.S. and a number of European nations, and its patron Iran, a stunning and surprising blow—depriving them and their political allies of a long-held majority in the parliament. Instead, voters have said, "enough." And Hezbollah's rivals have swept to stunning political gains. Final results Tuesday showed Hezbollah winning 62 of the 128 seats in Parliament, a reversal of the 71 majority they won four years ago. At least a dozen seats were snagged by reform-minded political newcomers while other Hezbollah opponents, especially the pro-Saudi Christian party Lebanese Forces, overtook the Hezbollah-aligned Free Patriotic Movement as the nation's largest Christian party. Indeed, the religious and political alignments in this long and deeply fractured nation will continue to pose a challenge to its stability, though an end to Hezbollah's dominance is without question a positive first step.
Certainly, it has seemed that too many elections around the world these days have marked a return to the past, no matter how much may be at stake in terms of the future prosperity and well-being of each nation and its citizens. Quite possibly because in these parlous times, voters just need something familiar, if deadly and dangerous, to hold onto—some constant that’s worked in a dimly recalled past that they hope, desperately so, could be made to work for them again. That was certainly the case May 8 in the Philippines and earlier in Hungary.
But something snapped last weekend in Lebanon. And now, Hezbollah seems to have lost the magic that has kept it in power for years. Now, it's up to the opposition—its main Christian rivals, especially the Saudi-backed Lebanese Forces—to show what they can do. The allies of Hezbollah and long-time supporters of Syria's brutal Iran-allied dictator Bashar al-Assad lost a substantial block of seats in the parliament.
Indeed, in the southern stretch of the country, hard by the northern border of Israel where repeated clashes have erupted for years and where Hezbollah itself ended at gunpoint a 22-year occupation by the Israeli military, now a reform candidate has catapulted into power.
The implications are potentially far-reaching for Lebanon and its deeply divided capital, Beirut—that I remember once as the Paris of the Middle East, but has not enjoyed that title for many years.
The 128-seat parliament is constitutionally divided evenly between Muslims and Christians. In 2018, Hezbollah and its allies, the Shia militia-turned political party Amal, won 27 seats, but commanded a majority of 70 seats with it allies, Lebanon's current president Michael Aoun and his Maronite Christian Free Patriotic Movement. Many voters went to the polls hoping that this would be the moment to change the nation's direction—to rid it of the deeply corrupt and violence-prone establishment, underwritten by malevolent forces from abroad and set the nation on a new path back to the time when Lebanon was truly a jewel of the Middle East. Perhaps they have taken the first, tentative steps in this direction.
The reality is that there has been no sustainable alternative to Hezbollah and its armed cadres in Lebanon for a very long time. Sayeed Hassan Nasrallah, the secretary-general of what Iran's Press TV calls "the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement" said, a week before the vote, that Lebanon would be facing a choice in the parliamentary elections "between a faction whose main concern is Lebanon and one that seeks to please the United States." Which said a lot about the stakes in Sunday's balloting.
The one individual who might have charted a course toward a professional, relative centrist government and restoration of a non-violent ruling class pulled out before the campaign even began. Former prime minister Sa'ad al-Hariri decided not even to run for parliament this time around. Moreover, he went even further—calling for Sunnis to boycott the vote entirely. And he exiled himself and his long-suffering family to the United Arab Emirates until after the balloting. Saudi Arabia was furious with Hariri for pulling this ploy. Some Sunni voters did indeed stay home. But enough came out and voted for reform.
The Saudis should hardly have been surprised by Hariri's move, of course. Four years ago, then the sitting prime minister, he'd had traveled to Saudi Arabia to campaign in the desert—or so he thought—with the malevolent Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS. Instead, Hariri was seized, stripped of his cell phone and bodyguards and ordered to go on television to resign from office and blame Iran for his actions. He was even urged to change from his desert campaign duds (jeans and t-shirt) into suit and tie—though his Saudi guards had to bring the suit to him where he was being held. He'd become a pawn in the nefarious maneuverings of MBS, though Hariri did wind up campaigning with him in the desert. Oh, and by the way, he returned to Beirut, after a month of what looked increasingly like house arrest in Riyadh, un-resigned, and finished out his term as prime minister of Lebanon. MBS's Machiavellian plot to stem the rise of Hezbollah and thwart Iran's efforts to spread its Shiite power into even some of the most Sunni-leaning regions of the Middle East had turned into a fiasco. As The New York Times put it back then, "Mr. Hariri remains in office with new popularity, and Hezbollah is stronger than before." And the Saudis were surprised about Hariri's recusal from this year's campaign?
Now the question becomes just how Hezbollah will react to its loss to Sunni-allied politicians and the new power that Saudi Arabia may be able to assert over Lebanon. The nation is still faced with some months of political wrangling over the formation of an actual government and just what role the reformists might play. The elections themselves were fraught with voting fraud—the main monitoring group The Lebanese Association for Democratic Elections documenting at least 3,600 violations including a number of cases of violent clashes, power failures and voting machine malfunctions. And then there is the question of the succession later this year to the nation's presidency, now held by Hezbollah ally Michel Aoun. If the Saudis are prepared to put their oil wealth in service of this nation where their allies are suddenly on the ascendant, that could be a critical weight on the side of reform and against any efforts of Hezbollah to retain power at gunpoint.
Though Hezbollah has had a tense, though still allied, relationship with Syria and the regime of the brutal dictator Bashir al-Assad, recently it had begun flexing some independent muscles, with the apparent approval of its supporters in Tehran. In Syria, Hezbollah moved to seize several military bases from Russian forces as they moved out to reinforce units in the Ukraine theater. Two weeks ago, Assad made one of his rare foreign visits—to Tehran, receiving a blessing from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and presumably his marching orders as Khamenei was quoted as saying the Iranian government is "very serious about the issue of Lebanon."
Now, with Hezbollah flexing its muscles inside Lebanon and Syria, and with Syria cementing its ties with Iran, the ultimate aim of all these forces came sharply into focus in Assad's visit to Tehran, which happened just a week before the Lebanese election. It's aim? To prevent "Israel from dominating the entire region." It would appear that Lebanese voters simply didn't buy this. The question going forward will be, can Hezbollah, the terrorist organization, be restrained from seizing power at gunpoint when voters rejected it at the ballot box.
I was first schooled on Lebanon by the incomparable Lebanese statesman Raymond Eddé, forced into exile by threats on his life. In December 1976, he'd left Beirut and traveled to Egypt on the invitation of President Anwar Sadat who persuaded him that his name was on the top of a list of targets to be assassinated. Eddé never returned to Beirut. A week later, he arrived in Paris. Beginning in 1980, when I arrived in Paris, we would meet from time to time in the apartment he kept in Paris’s fabled Hotel George V, steps from the Champs-Elysées. This Marronite Christian statesman, a confidant of Henry Kissinger and a host of other world leaders, was known widely as “Lebanon’s conscience.”
Over thick Lebanese coffee (“if the spoon cannot stand up in it, it is not real coffee”), Eddé would wax eloquent about his roots, his nation and the travails it was enduring. He never accepted Hezbollah and especially its increasingly close ties with Syria and Shiite dominated Iran—particularly after his beloved sister Andrée was gunned down by a sniper in 1978. When we were meeting in person, Lebanon was already deeply divided—the city of Beirut bisected by a toxic green line between Muslim and Christian quarters that was crossed only at profound peril to one's existence. Journalists, aid workers, anyone perceived as remotely vulnerable or ransomable could be snatched at will, held for ransom or simply executed. Raymond was horrified, protesting at every turn the dismemberment of his nation and his people. Sadly, he passed away at the age of 87 in the year 2000 and has really never been replaced.
Today, the nation is poised very much at a crossroads. Can it accept the results that voters seem to have chosen and avoid plunging again into the kind of sectarian violence that marked 15 years of civil war from 1975 through 1990? Last year, the World Bank called Lebanon's economic position one of the world's worst since 1850. And it has only sunk more deeply into a morass since then. Waves of covid, 200 percent inflation, a horrific collapse of the nation's currency—the Lebanese pound having lost 90 percent of its value—an all but insolvent central bank have led to three-quarters of the nation's population living below the UN-established poverty line. In August 2020, large stretches of Beirut were shredded by history's largest non-nuclear explosion when hundreds of tons of poorly-stored ammonium nitrate exploded at the port leaving 215 dead and thousands wounded.
Corrupt Lebanese politicians joined to block any investigation, which in turn led to deadly riots last October, further polarizing society and persuading many voters it just wasn't worth the effort to vote on Sunday. But many did—perhaps even enough.
Now the jockeying begins—it's often taken months to form an actual government. Who will retain power, who will increase their power, how many will simply be left out in the cold and how might they react? Lebanon needs all the support the west, especially international financial institutions, can muster at this critical moment and an historic opportunity.
Recalling the fate of so many in Lebanon who resisted Hezbollah, the new majority may wish before long to repair themselves to the George V.