The only perfect diagnosis is the autopsy. That is why a post-mortem of the Metn election last Sunday seems imperative to forecast what lies ahead in the dangerous liaisons between the opposition and the state.
To defeat Michel Murr, assuming the result stands, Nassib Lahoud and Amin Gemayel profited mainly from the anger and frustration of the militant Christian parties. Metn voters are famously polyvalent, but on Sunday Gabriel Murr’s voters took on the persona of Lebanese Forces and Aounist activists.
It was the “useful vote” that prevailed, so that by Sunday evening even Albert Mokheiber’s backers were shown to have cast their vote for Gabriel Murr instead of Ghassan Mokheiber. The polarization of the electorate reflected resentment against the state and its local agents, but also a vote against Syria and the perceived marginalization of the Christians.
The range of messages sent out by the Metn electorate is worth deconstructing. Many a voter must have had Ramzi Irani in mind when casting his or her ballot. The state, and particularly the interior minister, was made to pay for the outrageous assassination of the engineer, and the apathy displayed by the security services after his abduction.
Voters also recalled the arrests of last August, when hundreds of Lebanese Forces and Aounist sympathizers were rounded up, before others were beaten in the street. Despite the subsequent and irrelevant reconciliation between President Emile Lahoud and Prime minister Rafik Hariri, the victims did not forgive the intelligence services for behaving like vigilantes.
Implied in the election was also that Christians feel trivial. The novelty, however, was that voters chose to express this through the ballot box rather than through a sterile boycott. The Metn election was a turning point: henceforth, non-participation in elections will be seen as pointless, a message the arch-boycotter Michel Aoun appears to have absorbed.
For all the opposition’s success, underlying tension remains. There are three Christian camps arrayed against the state. There are the Aounists and Lebanese Forces. There are the more moderate Christians: Nassib Lahoud, but also Carlos Edde of the National Bloc, and Ghassan Mokheiber. And there is Amin Gemayel, holding the balance. Though hardly a radical, he relishes support from all sides.
That is why Nassib Lahoud must have been both bemused and alarmed to see his portrait held up next to that of Samir Geagea on Monday. And one has truly seen everything after surveying the former Communist Party leader, George Hawi, haranguing a crowd of Lebanese Forces and Aounist backers at the MTV building in Naccache.
Lahoud will find himself riding a tiger as he latches onto a militant Christian wave whose power he probably did not gauge when initially backing Gabriel Murr. That was why he was keen to have Walid Jumblatt declare on Wednesday that the Metn election was a victory for “Christian moderates.” Jumblatt thus made amends for his criticism of the Sodeco gathering the day before. But his analysis was only half correct.
The fact is that the “moderate Christians” Jumblatt backed, Carlos Edde and, by extension, Ghassan Mokheiber, looked to be the big losers of the Sunday poll. They rebounded thanks to Gabriel Murr’s triumph and their shrewd appearance in Sodeco. If Lahoud resents both men, he knows that they at least avoided a Faustian bargain with their ideological opposites. Lahoud will have to reconcile himself with Edde and others like him to dilute the influence of the militant Christian organizations.
Stepping back from opposition politics for a moment, the Metn election sent out two other messages. The first was that the Syrians were unwilling to sanction a confrontation between the state and the opposition over Myrna Murr. Senior military commanders were said to have refused to deploy the army against Gabriel Murr’s supporters, despite the inclinations of some at the highest levels of the state.
The opposition should mull this over as it prepares a strategy for the future. Headway can indeed be made if Syria determines that its interests are better served not by repressing the opposition, but by cutting it some slack. If opposition groups, militant and otherwise, are to gain, the Metn election proved they must do so piecemeal, preferably within the confines of state institutions they can turn their way.
A second lesson was that the media plays a pivotal role in the electoral process. The role of MTV in the past weeks helped shape the alliance between Lahoud, Gemayel and Gabriel Murr, and probably made possible Murr’s victory. The state will consider this as it prepares for the 2005 elections, while the reliance of several key politicians on TV stations may prevent the curtailing of implicit campaign programming.
The Sunday election was a minor revolution not only for the Metn, but also for post-Taif Lebanon. The opposition showed how, when mobilized, it could sweep away even the most potent of the state’s representatives. And the Syrians implicitly acknowledged that the opposition was less a threat to its interests when in positions of power than when demonstrating in the streets.
Most importantly, the Metn established that the stifling political stalemate of recent years was no more than a chimera, which the state can again impose only by paying a heavy price in terms of domestic stability.
 
Michael Young, a Reason magazine contributing editor, writes a weekly commentary for THE DAILY STAR

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