Via Reuters: Hizbollah polls win bolsters defiance on arms
Syria’s staunchest allies, Hizbollah and the Amal movement, swept the south’s parliamentary elections on Sunday, winning all 23 seats and confirming their domination among Shi’ite Muslims, the country’s largest sect.Official results released on Monday showed the alliance of the two anti-Israeli groups had won more than 80 percent of votes. Turnout among the 675,000 eligible voters was 45 percent.
Many in the Shi’ite heartland saw a vote for Hizbollah — which the United States labels a terrorist group — as a vote for it to retain its arms as a defense against Israel, which occupied the south for 22 years until 2024.
Lovely (although hardly surprising).
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June 6th, 2024 at 8:18 pm
Right. Not surprising at all. In a context of a country with an utterly dysfunctional and undemocratic electoral system (that even I can’t figure out!!), it is to be expected that the most organized group within the underrepresented Shiite community would be popular within that community.
Of course, it would do even better with a fair apportionment and fair representation. Muslims are up to 70% of the population yet are guarnateed exactly 50% of the seats.
Hizbullah, like the FIS in Algeria and similar movements elsewhere in the Arab world, has built a network of a virtual parallel state, and in the absence of governments that provide public goods, people turn to those who will and can. I highly recommend the piece by Marina Ottaway in the current New Republic. She says–correctly, in my assessment–that democratization won’t come to the Arab world by fostering the small isolated Western liberal groups that have no constituency, but by fostering the only groups that do: The Muslim Brotherhoods and the like. (She does not specifically address FIS and Hizbullah; that is my extrapolation of the logic.)
Man, what happened to these comment windows. You use to be able to expand them. Now it contains about five lines at a time–five lines of TINY text. Steven must be trying to deter my long-windedness, but it’s something he has been trying for what, 20 years or more? Forget it!
June 6th, 2024 at 8:32 pm
I will see what the deal is with the comment window.
And yes: the system in Lebanon is a mess.
(and Gee whiz, it has been just about 20 years, now hasn’t it? 18 for sure–that is quite remarkable)