Hezbollah in Driver's Seat in Lebanon

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton, NB] Times & Transcript

The Lebanese parliamentary election held May 6 produced, as always, a confusing array of winners and losers. But one thing is crystal clear: the militant Shia Muslim group Hezbollah is in the driver’s seat.

Lebanon’s 128-seat parliament allocates 64 seats each to the country’s Christian and Muslim faiths. They are then further subdivided between all of Lebanon’s 18 officially recognised religious sects.

This leads to confusing and oftentimes shifting coalition building among various parties across the sectarian divides.

Lebanon should have held elections in 2013, but deputies extended their terms three times because parties could not agree on a new electoral law.

The national turnout, at 49 per cent, was down compared to 54 per cent in 2009. In Beirut precincts, the turnout was just between 32 and 42 per cent. 

Some of this was attributed to confusion over the new electoral rules, which redrew constituency boundaries and changed the system from “first past the post” to proportional representation.

Altogether, 17 parties won seats, and a further 16 independents were also elected.

But the main race was between Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s Western and Saudi-supported Future Movement-led coalition and Hassan Nasrallah’s Hezbollah and its allies, backed by Iran.

In effect, the election was part of the region-wide power struggle that is tearing apart the Middle East.

Hezbollah and its Shia Muslim partner Amal won 28 seats between them; at least another 16 seats were won by other political parties aligned with them. 

By renewing their alliance with President Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a Maronite Christian party which took 16 seats, the two Shia groups will control enough seats needed to block the most important actions of parliament, for which a two-thirds quorum of members is required.

However, the FPM lost a few seats to Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces (LF), a more militant Christian grouping, which nearly doubled its number of seats to 13. Still, the FPM remains the largest Christian presence in parliament.

The Syrian civil war has divided Lebanon, pitting parties supporting Hezbollah’s intervention in Syria on behalf of President Bashar al-Assad against Saudi-aligned parties opposed to it.

Hariri’s Future Movement (FM) won 20 seats in the voting, and though this was a major decline from the 33 they previously held, he will still have the largest Sunni Muslim bloc in parliament.

But the election results show that Sunni voters are losing faith in Hariri’s party amid a stagnant economy and general exasperation over the war in Syria that has brought one million refugees to Lebanon.

The FM lost to Hezbollah and Amal-backed Sunni candidates even in Hariri’s strongholds of Beirut, Saida and Tripoli. 

Nasrallah called the results a “great political and moral victory for the resistance option that protects the sovereignty of the country.” 

Hezbollah has been a member of Lebanon’s coalition government since 2016 and will clearly continue to remain in it, regardless of who becomes prime minister.