Lebanese MPs outraged secularists and campaigners opposed to sectarian politics this past week by provisionally approving a voting law that would make it so citizens could only vote for candidates of their own sect. The so-called Orthodox Gathering draft law still needs to pass a parliamentary vote—but activists and youth groups have already decried it as a step back from representative democracy and a lurch towards confessional – some claimed racist – politics.
The bill was championed by Michel Aoun, the leader of the Maronite Christian Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) that contributes seven ministers to Lebanon’s current cabinet, alongside the Shiite Hezbollah, which has two portfolios. Aoun—who once said he wished to be a leader for all of Lebanon, not just its Christians—claims the Orthodox Gathering draft law will allow the country’s delicate sectarian balance to endure troubled times in the region. Aoun announced on Tuesday that the country was on the brink of civil war because its society was allegedly divided over the crisis in neighbouring–and strategically crucial–Syria. Supporters of the draft law have also claimed that it will ensure “proper” representation of Lebanon’s myriad sects. The inference being that Muslims must stop inadvertently voting in Christian candidates, as happens thanks to the current multi-sect list-based system.
Indeed, a law that will transform the country’s electoral political field from twenty-six qadas–or electoral districts—into a single voting arena does seem to overcome much of the suffrage inequality seen under the current 1960 electoral law. Under the current law in effect, a vote cast in the mainly Christian northern district of Keserwan (which is designated five seats for just under 90,000 voters) would, due to its allocation of parliamentary seats, carry more than twice the weight of a ballot cast in the mainly Shiite southern district of Tyre (which, is designated four seats for approximately 160,000 voters). By transforming Lebanon into a single voting district, the Orthodox draft law puts a stop to such regional inequality, forged from years of gerrymandering, but substitutes its own peculiar confessional discrepancies.
With the Orthodox draft law, Lebanon’s 922,000 registered Sunni voters would be casting ballots for twenty-eight Sunni-allotted seats in parliament (up one from 2009), providing an approximate representation of one Sunni parliamentary seat for every 33,000 Sunni voters. Alternatively, the 702,000 registered Maronite voters would cast ballots to fill thirty-four Maronite-allotted seats, therefore providing an approximate representation of one Maronite parliamentary seat for every 20,500 Maronite voters. The inequality of suffrage across the confessional board under the Orthodox law can be seen here.
From the maths, we can easily see why, for example, the Maronite FPM favors the Orthodox draft law, while the predominantly Sunni Future Movement (FM) withdrew its members from the electoral law committee just before the draft law was introduced into parliament in opposition to it. (Pragmatism lurks beneath FM leader Saad Hariri`s suggestion that the draft lawwas a “dark day” for lawmaking. Had he or any party opposed to the bill had anything to gain from the proposal, it would naturally have received their support.).
Political Opposition
But why, precisely, does the Future Movement believe it will lose out under the proposed ultra-confessional measure? First, the FM is Lebanon’s only genuine cross-sectarian party, its membership being comprised of mainly Sunnis, but also including Maronites, Greek Orthodox, Alawites, and other sects. Any electoral system based entirely on sectarian representation will see the party’s support dispersed at the very least. Second, despite being a predominantly Sunni party, the FM no longer claims a monopoly over Sunni votes. While it could once legitimately claim to be the undisputed Sunni political force in Lebanon, the emergence of extremely popular independent Sunni politicians—such as current Prime Minister Najib Mikati and Finance Minister Mohammed Safadi—as well as Islamist groups such as Hizb al-Tahrir are diluting the FM’s support base. If sect becomes the only electrical consideration, Sunni voters—all 922,000 of them—will no longer be beholden to electing the Future Movement MPs that share lists with their favored candidates. For example, in the last parliamentary elections of 2009, Mikati and Safadi ran as independents on the March 14 list, which included FM candidates and their allies. A vote for any one of the candidates on this list, FM or independents, constituted a vote for all candidates on the same list. Under the new draft law, there would be nothing stopping Mikati and Safadi joining a list of twenty-six other popular Sunni personalities and running as independent Sunnis. They would likely take several seats from the FM.
Beyond the FPM and FM, there is the mainly Druze Progressive Socialist Party (PSP), headed by the lugubrious political chameleon that is Walid Jumblatt. As a Druze “leader,” Jumblatt represents a minority sect that is slightly over represented in the current parliamentary electoral system, and has been hugely so in government. In 2009, the Druze constituted approximately 5.75 percent of all voters. Yet the PSP holds ten percent of the cabinet portfolios. However, Jumblatt is also the head of the PSP, which also counts among its MPs three Maronites, one Sunni, one Greek Catholic, and a Greek Orthodox. Obviously, a law where elections are decided on only one’s sect is unhelpful for the PSP, which officially classes itself as secular in any case.
On the other hand, if we analyze the Aoun and his FPM’s support for the Orthodox draft law, we come to the crux of Lebanese politics. Aoun believes—especially with rival Maronite leader and prominent March 14 figure Samir Geagea (or his wife) unlikely to run for parliament—that he is Lebanon’s single most popular Maronite politician. In the last general elections in 2009, under the incumbent majoritarian, winner-takes-all system, Aoun won all five seats in the FPM heartland of Keserwan. Thanks to the list-based voting system currently in place, he did so with just fifty-one percent of the votes cast in that district. In other words, Aoun—the self-styled leader of the Maronites—was a few hundred ballots away from a humiliating defeat in his own supposed stronglhold. By removing qadas from the equation, and since the FPM believes it has significant support across multiple districts, the Orthodox draft law will allow Aoun’s nationwide popularity to propel his party into more seats.
The potential wildcard in this equation is the Shiite Amal Movement leader Nabih Berri. As speaker of parliament, Berri can have a singificant influence over the Orthodox draft law, from setting the time frame for a parliamentary vote on it to facilitating the process of amending it. His party is likely to support the draft law, since the two main Shiite political parties of Amal and Hizbollah tend to be political allies when it comes to national politics. Amal currently has two more seats than its Hezbollah allies. However, with support among Shiite voters assumed to be virtually even between the two, Berri will lose no sleep over backing a law that allows him to appear progressive while not jeopardizing his party’s electoral prospects. In the unlikely event of Amal ceding a few seats to Hezbollah, Berri knows the value of an electoral alliance formed on shared confession, and will also not lose sleep worrying whether or not the Shiite contingent of March 8 shall endure.
Proportional Representation
With controversy surrounding the sectarianism of the Orthodox draft law, little has been made of the fact it also calls for the implementation of proportional representation (PR) voting. Coupled with an open list system encompassing preferential voting, whereby a member of the electorate can specify their favored candidate, the new law would effectively reward the most popular candidates and not the most popular list as is currently the case.
In 2009, there were some examples of how PR voting may have altered results. In the mixed Christian district of Beirut 1, the March 14 list clinched one hundred percent of the five available seats with just over fifty-two percent of votes cast. A PR system could have seen two of the most popular losers, candidates from the rival March 8 list, elected instead. Reproducing this pattern nationally creates the potential for a significantly altered parliamentary composition, had PR been implemented during the last vote. In other words, the law currently in effect allows for a winner-take-all outcome whereby the all seats in a given voting district go to the winning list, event if that list only won 50.0000001 percent of the votes cast in that district.
Open list PR balloting will allow voters to choose their preferred candidates from each list, and the candidate with the highest amount of preferential votes nationally gets the first seat in parliament, the second candidate gets the second seat, and so on. The “quotient” formula of seat allocation under the Orthodox draft law is so complex that, as one electoral observer put it: “It`s when candidates recognise this complexity that I think they`ll be nostalgic for [the current law].” But the point is that the number of votes a given list receives will be more or less proportionate to the seats it wins, rather than awarding all seats in a district to list with the most votes.
The elephant in the room, of course, is that voters will only be allowed to choose among their own confession.
Pre-printed Ballot Papers
The Orthodox draft law also proposes, for the first time in Lebanon’s history, that elections be held with pre-printed ballot papers, with lists organized in advance and provided exclusively by the Interior Ministry. This seemingly small development will have significant ramifications at polling booths.
The current electoral law allows for widespread vote rigging and buying, given the manipulable nature of ballot papers. Since there is no official production of voting documents, candidates can—and do—create ballots from anything. They can be printed out with different names on. For example, some rival candidates will hand out their own versions of the official lists, with opponents’ names omitted. And, given their bespoke nature, ballot papers can be tracked.
Voting coercion is widespread in Lebanon yet scenes of overt vote buying are relatively rare. The reason lies in the papers. At present, there is nothing stopping a candidate from producing specifically formatted ballots with, say, a unique font, or featuring a specific order of names. These are then handed out in neighbourhoods near the polling stations and ultimately tracked after the votes have been cast. For example, a candidate can hand out ten subtly distinct ballots to ten members of the same family he (or she; though predominantly he) expects to vote for him. Then perhaps, he only counts eight of that type of ballot in the ballot box after polling. Because of the specifically formatted ballots, the candidate has proof that two of the family of ten did not vote for him. He therefore will not deliver on any pre-election favor he may have pledged in exchange for those votes.
Alternatively, pre-printed ballots are uniform and therefore anonymous. They would put a stop to all the above-described chicanery, and allow for a more voter autonomy.
Progressive Legislation?
Some of have claimed that the Orthodox draft law’s provisions for PR voting, a supposed end to the gerrymandering of electoral districts, and the implementation of pre-printed ballots make a relatively progressive law. However, that is not exactly the case.
Obviously those opposed to the idea of voting based on sect will point to the draft law’s extreme sidelining of efforts to abolish sectarian confessionalism, not to mention those political forces that would seek to organize electoral campaigns on non-sectarian bases. However, there are in fact numerous additional problems with the Orthodox Gathering draft law.
The draft law has no provision for lowering the voting age. Before the last election, Parliament proposed to make good on reforms suggested by the 2005 Butros Commission for lowering the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen. However, it never materialized. Thus in the last parliamentary elections held in 2009, Lebanese citizens between the ages of eighteen and twenty were not allowed to vote even though they could quite easily be taxed, married, drive, and own a weapon. The Orthodox draft law does not address this issue.
Similarly, there is no mention in the Orthodox draft law of a women’s quota, which is another demand often raised by some feminist groups as well as electoral reform advocates. The formation of Mikati’s government in the summer of 2011 angered many with its thirty-strong cabinet which did not contain a single woman. However, issue of gender equality in government can be said to be fundamentally about candidature. Of the estimated 580 candidates who contested for a seat in 2009, just a handful were women and only two of the six female MPs did not seek reelection. Furthermore, all four women MPs in the current parliament belong to political dynasties, either through marriage or birth. Again, the Orthodox draft law missed a chance to secure greater female representation by implementing say the minimum thirty percent female candidate quota recommended by the Butros Commission.
The Vote on the Electoral Law
According to one parliamentary insider, the outcome of parliament’s vote vote on the Orthodox Gathering draft law—which will come after whatever amendments are discussed and voted on—will boil down to a few votes either way. The insider suggested that sixty-four MPs were currently in favor of the bill, while 60 MPs are likely opposed. Absenteeism aside, that leaves it to just four MPs to decide the fate of voting in Lebanon: Assaad Hardan and Marwan Fares of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), and Assam Qanso and Kassem Hashem from the Arab Socialist Ba’th Party of Lebanon (Ba‘th Party for short).
The SSNP and Ba‘th parties are publicly yet nominally secular, so should theoretically be opposed to the Orthodox draft law. But, as we know by now, politics and ideology do not always align. Many SSNP candidates are either Greek Orthodox or Greek Catholic, two of the sects most richly rewarded in terms of representation by the proposed draft law. The Ba‘thists are as secular and nationalist as their name suggests, but the fact remains that both they and the SSNP believe they have large, if diffuse, popular support. Divied up into qadas, that support diminishes to the extent that all four of the MPs mentioned above only got a seat in 2009 through list alliances. But what about a unified national voting district where members of each sect vote to fill seats allotted to that sect? Nationally, the support for these two parties and the voters sharing their sects could net both parties not-so-insignificant political gain. It is admittedly quite a dilemma in some sense. But history shows that when conviction is pitted against political expediency in Lebanon as elsewhere, political groups already in the system rarely back the former.
Sectarian Confessionalism
Obviously, the most controversial aspect of the Orthodox draft law is its emphasis on sectarian confessional representation. Its detractors say that privileging sectarian affiliation as the primary basis for candidacy and voting turns the democratic process into a intra-sectarian popularity contest. Only the most cynical observer would suggest this is already the case. The wording of the draft law itself is rather odd in this regard, stating that Jewish voters are the only voting groups that can choose between Christian and Muslim candidates, since Lebanon’s sixteen other officially recognized sects fall into the rough ballpark of either of those two faiths. As there are probably less than two-dozen registered Jewish voters, it is doubtful this will alter the outcome of the 2013 election.
Some proponents of the draft law have mooted that voters unhappy with sectarian-based elections can choose to remove their sectarian affiliation from their identification documents, opting out of belonging to a sect altogether. If only this were the case. In Lebanon, a citizen must be affiliated with one of the seventeen officially recognized sects as a condition of possibility for administratively engaging the state. It does not matter what faith an individual identifies herself as belonging to, or even what it says on her ID. The most ardent Atheist could proclaim there is no god, march up to a polling station in Zahle, and brandish their sect-free ID. But thanks to the fact that even voters without a sect are allocated to voting stations based on their registered family number, she would still find out she can only vote for candidates belonging to the sect she was born into. It is not about what religion one believes in, it is about where one votes, which is determined by the sect there are registered with. The Orthodox draft law will mean one can only vote in a polling station decided on by one`s sect. The same applies to candidates. They may not personally or administratively identify as belonging to a given sect. However, they are for the purposes of the elections still considered to be part of the sect they were born into or converted into. Some have suggested DNA testing to prove a candidate that claims he is, say, an Alawite, is, in fact, an Alawite. Even that were possible, this is regretfully unnecessary. A simple glance at the person’s birth certificate will determine what they are independent of anything else.
The Orthodox draft law has the power to seriously affect how members of parliament are selected and the balance of political forces therein. It is about two sets of choices. For politicians, a choice between continuing with a sorely out-dated and often inequitable process or one that prefers the cold, hard data of faith over geography; for voters, a choice between arbitrary alliance and religious affiliation, which many see as equally capricious. In toss-ups between politicians and voters, Lebanese Realpolitik dictates the former will get their way. The methodology of the new voting system may seem hair-brained, but it has been pioneered by lawmakers with much to gain from its passing. At the ballot box, the Orthodox draft law may throw up some surprises. For parliament, however, it will deliver something entirely predictable: to make it even easier for established political figures to remain so.