Lebanon's Election: Free but Not Fair

May 22, 2005

Every week, my husband and I take a rickety old taxi to Hezbollah country. The emerald city of downtown Beirut, with its glittering luxury towers, drops away behind us; ruined buildings, their shell-shocked hulks festooned with laundry, loom ahead like ghost ships.

We soon leave Beirut proper and reach the dahiya -- the dense and sprawling Shiite crescent, half suburb, half slum, that cradles the city's southern borders. In the dahiya, home to my in-laws and a large swath of Beirut's population, the recent anti-Syrian protests that became known as the Cedar Revolution seem like a fairy tale. "As an area, as dahiya, we're not concerned about what's happening in downtown," one college student told me in March while demonstrations raged in Martyrs' Square. "We regard what's happening as a joke."

Around the world, however, the candy-cane banners and multilingual college kids of the uprising caught the imagination of millions. Holding parliamentary elections on time, free of Syrian influence, became democracy's new rallying cry. President Bush cautioned against delaying the poll, scheduled to run on four consecutive Sundays beginning May 29.

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Aoun-Jumblatt alliance unlikely in Lebanon polls

By Majdoline Hatoum
Daily Star , May 23, 2005

BEIRUT: With less than a week left to go before the start of the first leg of Lebanon's Parliamentary elections, the electoral alliance between leader of the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) Michel Aoun and leader of the Progressive Socialist Party (PSP) Walid Jumblatt appears to have disintegrated into shambles.

But the possibility of an alliance between Aoun's FPM and Saad Hariri, head of the Future Movement and Jumblatt's staunchest political ally, remained strong with reports that a coalition might be formed between the two parties in North Lebanon.

Aoun, who formally announced he will be running in the elections, said Sunday: "We will continuediscussions with Hariri even if talks have ended with Jumblatt."

Meanwhile, Speaker Nabih Berri called on all Lebanese political factions to hold an internal discussion aimed at building "Lebanese unity," adding that sectarianism has driven the Lebanese apart.