All’s well that ends well, but Shakespeare never saw a by-election in Metn, and the fact that Gabriel Murr has been declared the winner over his niece is by no means the end of this story. The enduring lesson of this embarrassing episode came from the decidedly unlikely source of one Elias Murr, who in his capacity as interior minister explained his delay in announcing the results by complaining that “the judges” had not done their job properly. He has rarely made so accurate a statement, even if it failed to take into account that the reasons for conspicuous judicial dithering stem from the refusal of the powers that be (including the interior minister) to give “the judges” the independence they need to carry out their duties.
Remedying this situation requires the enthusiastic participation of the president, the prime minister, and the Cabinet. Justice Minister Samir Jisr has to come up with a plan to empower the nation’s judges, and anyone who really wants to end this stage of Lebanon’s long and painful transition to democracy had better help him implement it.
As for the results of the race itself, Gabriel Murr was far from the only winner: This victory was also scored by the opposition generally, by the Qornet Shehwan Gathering particularly, and Metn MP Nassib Lahoud personally. Together these entities make up a formidable grouping, especially when one includes an Aounist camp that seems finally to have figured out that it can and should make a bigger difference by trying to change the system from within instead of sniping at it from the sidelines.
But as is so often the case in any political struggle, winning means that the real work has only just begun. The Christian-led opposition that triumphed in Metn is educated, knowledgeable, modern, and relatively youthful ­ the latter quality being especially the case with regard to its constituency. But it has been these things for a long time; the difference now is that it is also united. The ability to win elections is one of the benefits conferred by that development, but forging a common front also incurs certain responsibilities that relate to practical politics, and most of them have to do with cobbling together a realistic platform for the 2005 general elections that explains how the opposition would run Lebanon and why their way would be better than that which prevails today.
The bloc must now move beyond the sloganeering at which it is so adept and propose workable solutions for this country’s innumerable problems. How would they reform the bureaucracy? What kind of relationship do they foresee between themselves and other religious communities? They want, understandably, to be Syria’s partners rather than its serfs, but how would they go about changing the relationship?
Sunday’s was a protest vote, of course, and it signaled an accelerating dissipation of tolerance for graft, an inconsistent legal system, and many other hallmarks of a dysfunctional state. If the opposition wants to justify the commitment of all the voters who cast their ballots for change, its leaders must now show an equal commitment to the drafting and selling of detailed proposals to show how they plan to turn this country around.

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