BEIRUT — Like many of her peers, Doaa Ibrahim is anxious about the lack of job opportunities for young people in her homeland of Lebanon and is frustrated by the political system that doles out power and favors based on sect. Ibrahim, 25, lives in Lebanon’s impoverished rural northern governorate of Akkar and works part-time teaching supplementary Arabic classes to Syrian refugee children.
Ibrahim says she isn’t pinning her hopes on the upcoming election to improve daily life.
“Nothing is going to change — I am sure. For sure they are going to lie to us, like they lied to our parents.”
Ibrahim is joined by many first-time voters in the country who are greeting the contest with a shrug. On May 6, Lebanon will hold its first parliamentary elections in nine years, a vote that may test the nation’s proclaimed neutrality in the fractious Middle East by reshaping the calculus between the region’s two powers, Iran and Saudi Arabia.
A small nation of about 6 million people, Lebanon is still recovering from a 1975-90 civil war that tore apart the country. An estimated 2 million Palestinian and Syrian refugees have poured into the country, challenging the government’s rebuilding efforts.
A majority of the nation’s population is Muslim, which in turn is roughly evenly split between the religion’s two primary sects, the Sunnis and Shiites. That divide helps make the country vulnerable to the rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia; Iran’s population is largely Shia Muslim, while Saudi Arabia’s is primarily Sunni Muslim.
Hundreds of thousands of young people will have their first chance to cast a vote in a national contest. Some young Lebanese are pinning their hopes on the contest as a chance for new faces to break into an entrenched political structure in which many of the major players are holdovers from the civil war that ended nearly 30 years ago. Other young voters are skeptical of any reach change.
Scheduled elections in 2013 were postponed, ostensibly due to concerns about security amid the spillover of the Syrian civil war. Another delay came and went because political leaders were unable to agree on a new election law and districts.
Passage of a new election law last year paved the way finally for this year’s elections, which have seen the emergence of dozens of independent candidates.
They are hoping to capitalize on the momentum that began with mass protests in 2015, when a waste management crisis that left mountains of garbage rotting on the streets of Beirut became a flashpoint for pent-up discontent about the dysfunctional nature of Lebanese politics and the country’s failing infrastructure and public services.
The momentum carried forward into Beirut’s 2016 municipal elections, in which a new political campaign called Beirut Madinati (or “Beirut, My City”) formed out of the trash crisis made a strong — although ultimately unsuccessful — showing.
Now, a coalition calling itself Kilna Watani (or “We Are All for the Nation”) has put forth 66 candidates in districts throughout the country, including both political newcomers and defectors from the traditional parties.
The fate of the new political actors may depend on the new generation of voters. More than 600,000 Lebanese citizens have reached the voting age of 21 since the last elections in 2009, according to the National Democratic Institute, and now make up about 16 percent of eligible voters.
Many young people are backing the new parties, or at least willing to give them a shot — particularly among the educated class living in Beirut,
“I don’t know if civil society will be able to change anything,” says Myriam el Khoury, a 26-year-old digital project manager from Beirut. “But I know they’re new. They haven’t been here for the past 30 years, and I don’t see a problem with giving them a chance.”
But others regard the new actors with as much suspicion or indifference as the old.
“Even though there are some young faces and there are new civil society programs, not traditional parties, they are not able to convince me,” says Hala Nasrallah, a 25-year-old journalist with the Arabic language news site Daraj Media. “They don’t give me anything besides the normal political promises that will end in time.”
Nasrallah says the new political campaigns have been conspicuously absent in the southern suburbs of Beirut where she lives. The working-class Shia Muslim area is a stronghold of support for Iranian backed political party-cum-militia Hezbollah, but Nasrallah says she, like Ibrahim, does not support any party.
The one thing she has decided is that when given the option to choose her preferred candidate on a list, she will pick a woman. Although only a reported 111 out of 976 registered candidates are women, it’s an increase from the last election and offers a chance to increase their strikingly low representation in Parliament, where only four out of 128 members now are women.
Some of the new candidates are pessimistic about the election’s impact.
Marwan Maalouf, a leader of the 2015 trash protests, initially threw his name in as an independent candidate in this year’s election in the northern Koura district. But after five months of campaigning, he withdrew. Malouf says he was unable to find a slate to run with that he believed would have a credible chance of winning.
“You realize there is no momentum. People are not motivated,” says Maalouf, who spent months talking to voters. “I feel that the ground is not yet ready.”
Even if it ushers in some new faces, analysts say the election may also shore up the political position of established power brokers, particularly Iran-backed Hezbollah.
Lokman Slim, a Lebanese political commentator and activist who is critical of Hezbollah, says the elections will almost certainly benefit the group and its allies and weaken its political opponents, the most prominent of whom is Prime Minister Saad Hariri.
Hezbollah will benefit in two ways, Slim says. “On the one hand, it will enhance its respectability by saying, look, we are political actors and Lebanon is a country that has elections. First, it will gain in terms of respectability, second it will have the upper hand (in Parliament).”
If Hezbollah and its allies do manage to take a parliamentary majority, it could have implications for regional relations, drawing the country closer to Iran in its ongoing power struggle with Saudi Arabia and away from the orbit of the United States and other Western powers.
“If Hezbollah wins a slight majority, we’re going to see a massive rapprochement with the Syrian regime, that’s for sure,” says Mohanad Hage Ali, communications director at the Carnegie Middle East Center. The country might also see a pullback of its military ties with the United States and potentially signing of a military compact with Russia instead, he says.
Hezbollah, in fact, may get a boost from the young generation of voters.
A survey of first-time Lebanese voters aged 21 to 29 from around the country, conducted by Statistics Lebanon for Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, a German think tank affiliated with Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union, found that two-thirds of them would vote based on loyalty to traditional parties, and only 6 percent said they would vote for one of the new “civil society” lists.
Among those surveyed, Hezbollah was the most popular political party and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, the most popular political figure — although the percentage supporting them was still quite low. Among those surveyed, 12 percent said that Hezbollah was the party best representing their opinion and 22 percent said Nasrallah was the political figure who best represented them.
But about one-quarter of respondents said none of the existing political parties or figures expressed their opinions.
Even if the elections don’t usher in the wave of reform that many had hoped for, some see it as a first step toward a political opening.
“I feel like the upcoming election is really not going to make a lot of difference on the ground,” says Aya al Bawwab, a 27-year-old graphic designer from Beirut who says she believes 10 or 15 civil society candidates will get into Parliament.
“But,” she adds, “I’m hoping that in four years’ time, people will have believed that, yes, civil society can get into Parliament, so how about we vote for these people.”
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Young Adults’ Hopes, Doubts Cloud Lebanon?s Elections originally appeared on usnews.com
