Gemayel Defeat: Beginning of the End of Lebanese Sectarian Politics?

I never was a fan of Hizbullah’s overall strategy for Lebanon or of FPM’s leader with his Napoleonic complex. However, I think that the defeat of Amin Gemayel to a relatively unknown FPM candidate Camille Khoury signals a seismic shift in Lebanese politics. Just think of the setting: an aggrieved father, the scion of one of the most powerful political dynasties in Lebanon, Amin Gemayel, running for the parliamentary seat of his assassinated son in the Maronite heartland of the Metn. In the hereditary politics of the Middle East, the results should have been a forgone conclusion. What went wrong is succinctly summarized in the words of one of the Metn voters. Referring to the Lebanese Forces, he said that they took us for granted.

As my previous postings show, I was in favor of the broad outlines of Lebanon’s Cedar revolution. I was however disturbed by the hijacking of these ideals by the unholy alliance that came together to form the March 14 group. On local politics, they advocated the status quo; that is preserving the power and economic privilege of the well-heeled and the well-connected and did nothing to curb the influence of traditional feudal families. Most destructive, however, has been their single-minded, obsessive and very public anti-Syrian stance. That is not to say that the Syrian regime in not culpable for some if not many of what they are accused of, but having your whole political platform be consumed by a vendetta against Syria does nothing for the problems your constituents are facing.

As the gap between rich and poor grew in the post civil war years, the Lebanese middle class was eviscerated. The previously privileged Maronite middle class perhaps lost most of all. I was shocked in recent years, on seeing how decrepit some of the inner neighborhoods of the Northern Christian suburbs of Beirut have become. In fact they came to resemble some of the areas of the Dahiyeh. Is it any wonder, that the underprivileged among the Christians came to identify more with the populist politics of FPM and Hizbullah than with the tired rhetoric of the Lebanese Forces. It is very telling that the voters of the Metn were willing to break with a party that had been seen as the traditional defenders of the sect.

Whether the net outcome of this election will be positive or not is impossible for me to say. However, the fact that voters broke with their sectarian impulse to vote for Gemayel just because he was a Gemayel, is an important and positive development.