Bassam Za’za’, Legal and Court Correspondent

Dubai: Football player Lionel Messi is Argentinian, and Cristiano
Ronaldo is Portuguese, but despite these facts a Lebanese voter decided
otherwise as he cast his ballot for the Barcelona superstar to represent
him in Lebanon’s municipal election.

As results of polling
stations in Lebanese capital, Beirut, started rolling out around 9pm, an
image of an anonymous voter’s ballot favouring Messi over Ronaldo
started going viral on social media networks.

Mockingly expressing
disgust and desperation and distrust of the credibility of the
municipal election, the voter crossed off Ronaldo’s name and ticked yes
on Messi’s.

The image contained the footballers’ names inked on a
white piece of paper on its top half, while the bottom half was partly
slid into a brown beige envelope that had the 2016 municipal election’s
logo and the name of Lebanon’s Ministry of Interior and Municipalities.

In
yet another image ridiculing the elections, a voter wrote on the ballot
that he wanted “extra-garlic shawarma sandwich”, prioritising appetite
over the city’s election

Lebanese politicians have failed to vote for a president since May
2014 and the current members of parliament have extended their tenure
twice after failing to hold any legislative elections since the
country’s last balloting process that took place in 2010.

Few thousands of voters, constituting less than 20 per cent of the electorate, turned out for this round covering Beirut.

Meanwhile, up to 48 per cent of registered voters cast their ballot in Bekaa Valley.

Three more voting rounds will follow in May’s three remaining weekends.

Sunday’s
voting process kicked off slowly around 7am and as voters started
marching towards polling stations, a faction of Lebanese citizens used
social media platforms using ironic and sarcastic images to express
their distrust and disbelief in the voting process and belief that the
same members of the current municipal councils will be reelected.

Comical
images started appearing as several social media users took to
Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and other means to ridicule the voting
process and slate its ineffectiveness out of disbelief that a
breakthrough will happen.

One of the images showed a
coloured-thumbs up sign [indicating that the person had voted] with a
text beside it reading ‘in elections you stamp with your thumb’ while a
middle finger is shown underneath with a text beside it reading ‘after
voting they will stamp for you using this finger’.

Lebanese municipal election takes place every six years.