Lebanon’s disappointing elections

Two days after the first round of the Lebanese parliamentary elections, the mood in the country seems pretty disappointed– apathy and alienation from the country’s ultra-arcane electoral process seem to be ruling the day.
In Tuesday’s Daily Star, Hanna Anbar and Michael Glackin write:

Oh dear. Just four months after Lebanon’s people electrified the world and toppled a government; less than five weeks after the last Syrian soldier left Lebanon, we have finally discovered it wasn’t just an inept government that Lebanese people had to deal with, it was an inept political class.
For all the justified talk of “Cedar Revolutions” and “People Power” the abysmal turnout in Sunday’s first round of polling underlines the huge chasm that separates the aspirations of the Lebanese people from the painfully limited ambitions of their politicians.
The run up to the start of Lebanon’s much touted elections revealed its political leaders, Hariri, Jumblatt, Aoun et al had all fallen spectacularly short of the people they purport to represent…

The first round of elections involved just Beirut. Nine of the 19 seats there were uncontested. As you can see from this official report on the contests for the other ten seats there, they weren’t really “contested” in any serious way at all… More like, the voting in each of those mutli-seat constituencies was cooked by the parties in advance, so the difference in votes between those who “won” and those who didn’t win was enormous.
Also, turnout was pathetic. Around 30%. This seems in good part like an indicator of large support for the recently returned General Michel Aoun, who was urging a boycott of elections that, he claimed, had been pre-cooked by all the old pols of the 1990s.
I think there are four rounds of elections altogether, covering all the country. The last round is June 19th. I don’t know the exact schedule of which districts vote when. (Can anyone help with that?)
Anyway, Hizbullah, having done a deal with Amal, reportedly looks set to do well in the elections. All the reports from the previous three rounds of parliamentary elections and the two rounds of municipal elections in which they’ve competed describe the discipline that marked the party’s participation, as well as the savvy political smarts they displayed in “playing” Lebanon’s extremely complex electoral game. (Even while they continue to argue for simple, and much more accountable, one-person-one-vote democracy.)
In previous elections they’ve always had to defer to Syria’s main puppets inside the Shia community, Amal. This time, they can relate to Amal on a much more realistic (that is, stronger) basis.
The elections do seem interesting at some levels, though. For example, the most amazing backroom deals seem to be underway– between Jumblatt and Hizbullah, potentially between Jumblatt and Aoun, etc etc.
So much better than fighting, anyway.