Joseph A. Kechichian, Senior Writer

Beirut: Typical of Lebanese who seldom await official results to
boast achievements, Hezbollah deputy chief Shaikh Naim Qasim called a
press conference and announced the success of the party’s lists in
Baalbek and Brital. No official results were released as of Monday
afternoon.

Qasim, however, declared that these elections
“succeeded in breaking the obstruction that plagued the state and that
[the government was] able to successfully complete the electoral
process”, which was an interesting avowal since few party members backed
the state.

At 2am on Monday, the Head of the “Beirutis” municipal
electoral list, Jamal Itani, also announced that his list won the
capital’s municipal elections, while Interior Minister Nouhad Al
Mashnouq was jubilant that “the Lebanese proved that they deserve
freedom and democracy”.

On Sunday, the first leg of four weekly
polls ended in what were largely peaceful municipal and mayoral
elections, even if commentators lamented poor voter turnout, 20.14 per
cent in Beirut and 49.02 per cent in the Bekaa Valley.

As
expected, establishment-backed electoral lists scored victories even if a
major media campaign by “Beirut Madinati” (Beirut My City), a
grass-roots secular coalition of academics, artists, technocrats,
engineers and activists, in other words, members of civil society who
intended to inject fresh blood in the ossified system, failed to make
inroads. This illustrated the traditional grip enjoyed by political
parties who loathed any idea of surrendering their decades-old clasp of
the state.

If Beirut and most of Bekaa voted for established parties, a fiercely
contested election battle in Zahle produced equally determined results.
The predominantly Christian town in the heart of the Bekaa saw a
coalition of three key groups, the Free Patriotic Movement, the Lebanese
Forces and the Phalange Party, which won the majority of the city’s
21-member municipal council.

This victory dealt a setback to two
rival lists, one backed by Myriam Skaff, head of the Popular Bloc and
wife of the late pro-Syrian strongman Elias Skaff, and another supported
by an equally pro-Syrian official, deputy Nicolas Fattoush.

Television
broadcasts showed several breaches in Zahle where fistfights and vote
buying were all too visible even if 20,000 Internal Security Forces and
Lebanese Army troops maintained order. Security was extremely heavy
outside schools and other locations transformed into polling stations,
with officers assisting handicapped voters manoeuvre through stairs and
other inaccessible facilities.

In the event, the electoral process was marred by a few noteworthy
incidents, as Skaff and Fattoush supporters brawled in Zahle’s Mar Elias
neighbourhood with opponents, which prompted the army to intervene. A
few apartments in the Hawsh Al Umara neighbourhood were raided by ISF
troops after claims that the lists backed by Skaff and Fattoush were
buying votes there.

Although the Interior Minister reported that
no evidence of any vote buying operations were found during the raids,
Al Mashnouq recanted when videos of money exchanging hands were shown on
television. He declared that “one person was arrested on charges of
vote buying in Zahle” and that “authorities were probing a list of
individuals suspected of paying electoral bribes in specific areas”.

The
festive day was marked by comical moments as Progressive Socialist
Party leader Waleed Junblatt took to Twitter to post a sarcastic comment
after the Future Movement’s Sa’ad Hariri mistakenly cast a municipal
poll ballot in a box for the mayoral elections. “Even Shaikh Sa’ad is
not convinced of the ‘Beirutis’ List,” wrote Junblatt though he quickly
deleted his tweet.

In the event, Junblatt was not the only
individual to enjoy himself, as most streets donned folkloric garb. In
the capital, thousands of Beirut Madinati volunteers, mostly young men
and women, handed motorists near polling stations copies of their list.
Although 650 complaints were apparently recorded, it was too soon to
determine whether any of them were actual voters or whether they were
carefully planted troublemakers to prevent the 476,021 eligible voters
in Beirut (distributed among 1,646 polling stations in the capital),
308,717 voters in the Bekaa (1,158 stations), and 303,102 voters in the
Baalbek and Hermel districts (1,101 stations), from casting ballots.

Observers
who were surprised by the low-turn out provided various explanations,
including the fact that many of those registered in Beirut were out of
the country, working overseas to support their families.

With
these victories, however, establishment politicians like Hariri and
Hezbollah achieved their declared goals: the first to consecrate equal
power sharing between Muslims and Christians, and the second to deny any
other Shiite candidate or group the opportunity to challenge it.

The
second stage of the municipal election will occur in Mount Lebanon on
May 15, followed by South Lebanon and Nabatiyyah on May 22, and North
Lebanon and Akkar on May 29.