Political Deadlock Leaves Lebanon to Unravel

BEIRUT—On the surface, Lebanon appears to be weathering the mayhem that has engulfed the Middle East surprisingly well. Despite dire predictions of sectarian strife spreading from next-door Syria, there has been relatively little violence. Fancy restaurants on Beirut’s seafront remain packed with diners, the streets clogged with traffic.

But it is also increasingly a country adrift, hostage to the regional conflict between Saudi Arabia, long a supporter of Lebanon’s Sunni political bloc, and Iran, sponsor of the Shiite bloc dominated by the Hezbollah militia. This zero-sum confrontation has translated into political deadlock—and the steady unraveling of the Lebanese state.

“It isn’t a failing state, it is a fading state. There is nothing left of it, just a shell,” said Ibrahim Shamseddine, a former Lebanese cabinet minister and a prominent Shiite politician independent of Hezbollah.

It has been almost two years that Lebanon has been without a president. The parliament has been unable to elect one because Hezbollah and its allies have boycotted the legislature’s sessions. The latest—38th—such attempt to hold the vote failed in April because of the lack of a quorum.
The parliament’s own term expired all the way back in 2013, and no national elections are in sight even though municipal polls are slated for this month. A Lebanese government, which unites all the main political forces, still exists. But the ministers have been unable to do much actual governing because important decisions require the elusive consensus.

“There is a desire to run away from reality.…It is kind of going into a suicidal process, which is unacceptable in a country that is a rare democracy in the Middle East,” said Ibrahim Kanaan, a prominent lawmaker from the Free Patriotic Movement of Michel Aoun, one of two main contenders for the presidency.

While the political crisis hasn’t led to bloodshed—no major political force in Lebanon wants to replay the horrors of the 1970s and 1980s civil war—it already is suffocating economic activity.

Lebanon’s economy stagnated last year. It isn’t expected to do better in 2016, in part because of tensions with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, which have advised their citizens to vacation elsewhere to protest Iran’s rising influence in the country. This in turn is undermining the critical tourism and property industries.

National debt and the government deficit, meanwhile, have ballooned—a trend economists expect will continue as long as the political paralysis persists.

For a while, this deadlock was acceptable to many Lebanese political forces. Everyone was waiting to see how the war in Syria, the big neighbor that traditionally dominated Lebanese politics, would play out and how the outcome would affect the balance of power within Lebanon.
While it is far from over, Russia’s intervention to shore up President Bashar al-Assad’s regime has been a vindication for Hezbollah, which has lost hundreds of fighters on the Syrian battlefields.

Hezbollah’s decision to get involved in Syria also earned it a degree of admiration from many Lebanese Christians, terrified by the prospect of Sunni Islamist radicals coming to power in Damascus, and even from some Sunnis.

“If Hezbollah had not gone to Syria, the war would have come to Lebanon, and we would have seen [Islamic State] all over our cities and towns,” said Kamel Wazne, a political analyst and director of the American Strategic Studies center in Beirut.

But it is far from certain that success in Syria, at the end of the day, would bring meaningful political gains for Hezbollah at home. For one, the Lebanese system, based on guaranteed shares of power for its 18 religious sects, is built to limit such ambitions.

“In the Lebanese formula of power-sharing nobody can get more than what they were getting originally. No one side can be able to be the dominant power,” said Yassine Jaber, a parliament member from the Shiite Amal party, a Hezbollah ally, and a former minister of economy.

But, in the absence of a functioning state, Hezbollah—the only Lebanese political force with a significant military muscle—is able to exercise de facto control over issues that matter to it and to its Iranian patrons.

Ghattas Khoury, a former lawmaker and an adviser to Saad Hariri, the country’s leading Sunni politician, pointed out that Hezbollah continues to impede a presidential election even though both leading candidates, who must be Christian, are from political forces aligned with it.

“The status of chaos that the Lebanese institutions are living in isn’t against Hezbollah and Iran, but against all the other Lebanese,” Mr. Khoury said. “At the present time, Hezbollah and Iran don't want a president at all. They enjoy the vacuum of leadership and power.”

Source : http://www.wsj.com/articles/political-deadlock-leaves-lebanon-to-unravel-1462440603

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