BEIRUT: Lebanese voted on Sunday in the first parliamentary election since the country’s economic collapse, with many saying they hoped to deal a blow to ruling politicians they blame for the crisis even if the odds of major change appear slim.
The election, the first since 2018, is seen as a test of whether the heavily armed, Iran-backed Hezbollah and its allies can preserve their parliamentary majority amid soaring poverty and anger at parties in power.
Since Lebanon last voted, the country has been rocked by an economic meltdown that the World Bank has blamed on the ruling class, and by a massive explosion at Beirut’s port in 2020.
But while analysts believe public anger could help reform-minded candidates win some seats, expectations are low for a big shift in the balance of power, with Lebanon’s sectarian political system skewed in favor of established parties.
“Lebanon deserves better,” said Nabil Chaya, 57, voting with his father in Beirut.
“It’s not my right it’s my duty — and I think it makes a difference. There’s been an awakening by the people. Too little too late? Maybe, but people feel change is necessary.”
Fadi Ramadan, a 35-year-old voting for the first time, said he wanted to give a “slap to the political system” by picking an independent.
“If the political system wins, but only just, I consider that I would have won,” said Ramadan, casting his vote in Beirut.
In southern Lebanon, a political stronghold for the Shiite Hezbollah movement, Rana Gharib said she had lost her money in Lebanon’s financial collapse, but was still voting for the group.
“We vote for an ideology, not for money,” said Gharib, a woman in her thirties who was casting her vote in the village of Yater, crediting Hezbollah for driving Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in 2000.
Polls are due to close at 7:00 p.m. (1600 GMT), with unofficial results expected overnight.
The economic meltdown has marked Lebanon’s most destabilizing crisis since the 1975-90 civil war, sinking the currency by more than 90 percent, plunging about three-quarters of the population into poverty, and freezing savers out of their bank deposits.
The last vote in 2018 saw Hezbollah and its allies — including President Michel Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), a Christian party — win 71 out of parliament’s 128 seats.
Those results pulled Lebanon deeper into the orbit of Shiite Muslim-led Iran.
Hezbollah has said it expects few changes from the make-up of the current parliament, though its opponents — including the Saudi-aligned Lebanese Forces, another Christian group — say they hope to scoop up seats from the FPM.
Adding a note of uncertainty, a boycott by Sunni leader Saad Al-Hariri has left a vacuum that both Hezbollah allies and opponents are seeking to fill.
As the vote neared, watchdogs warned that candidates would purchase votes through food packages and fuel vouchers issued to families hit hard by the financial collapse.
Nationals over the age of 21 vote in their ancestral towns and villages, sometimes far from home.
The incoming parliament is expected to vote on long-delayed reforms required by the International Monetary Fund to unlock financial support to ease the crisis.
It is also due to elect a president to replace Aoun, whose term ends on Oct. 31.
Whatever the outcome, analysts say Lebanon could face a period of paralysis as factions barter over portfolios in a new power-sharing cabinet, a process that can take months.
Prime Minister Najib Mikati, a tycoon serving his third stint as premier, could be named to form the new government, sources from four factions have told Reuters.
Mikati said last week he was ready to return as premier if he was certain of a quick cabinet formation.
Lebanon holds first parliament election since financial collapse, Beirut port blast
https://arab.news/wjk2q
Lebanon holds first parliament election since financial collapse, Beirut port blast
- Election seen as a test of whether Hezbollah and its allies can preserve their parliamentary majority
- Country has been rocked by an economic meltdown that the World Bank has blamed on the ruling class
Of strikes and succession: How Iran’s ‘mosaic regime’ endures after Khamenei’s killing
- Experts say Iran’s dispersed power structure was built to withstand leadership decapitation and prolonged confrontation
- Succession uncertainty persists, but entrenched institutions and security networks keep the regime functioning
LONDON: Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed on Saturday along with much of the Iranian regime’s senior civilian and military leadership. But, thanks to Iran’s “mosaic” leadership structure, the regime itself is far from dead.
When Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, died of natural causes in 1989, his successor, Khamenei, took office the very next day.
Now Khamenei is dead, killed along with dozens of members of his family and other senior Iranian leaders in a series of US and Israeli attacks on targets across Tehran. Days later, the succession question remains unanswered.
But this, experts suggest, does not mean that Iran is drifting rudderless in a power vacuum — or that cutting off the head will kill the snake.
“The Iranian regime is a system that was built to last,” said Dr Burcu Ozcelik, a senior research fellow at the London-based Royal United Services Institute.
“It has constitutional provisions in place and deep contingency planning, with four or five names for each key role, and so there was a high level of preparedness for a leadership decapitation campaign.”
Contingencies for just such an eventuality, which were first put in place at the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, “were stepped up after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Iranians assessed that there would be a long-lasting confrontation with Israel.
“And although the attacks that followed didn’t lead to a regional confrontation of the sort we are seeing now, the Iranians have been long preparing for this.”
This is what Robert Pape, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, specializing in international security affairs, characterized this week as “the mosaic regime.”
“Iran anticipated decapitation long before (the US operation) Epic Fury began,” he wrote on Substack.
“Under its ‘mosaic’ leadership defense doctrine, authority is dispersed into semi-autonomous cells across military, security, and political domains. Redundancy substitutes for hierarchy.”
Pape added: “Airpower kills leaders; it does not easily kill distributed function.”
This was reflected in comments from Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, who said the regime had “prepared for these moments” and had “planned for all scenarios.”
Indeed, despite multiple attacks by Israel and the US on senior civilian and military leadership, the drones and missiles keep coming across the Arabian Gulf.
The Iranian state “can be best described as polymorphous,” said Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, professor of global thought and comparative philosophies at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
Western media, he added, “has a skewed understanding of the political dynamics in Iran and there is also a political agenda behind the misrepresentations.
“The tragedy is that this false reality informs decisions. This is why we are facing this horrific war. Bad, ideological knowledge created bad, impulsive decisions.”
Within Iran, he said, “there are several institutions that compete with each other and are anchored quite firmly in networks permeating society.”
At the heart of the system is the supreme leader, who supervises the other branches of government, including elected bodies such as the presidency, the Assembly of Experts and the parliament.
“And then there are the security layers, the military (Artesh), the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and their underbellies — for instance the Basij units with their representation in every university, municipal council, large organizations and even the smallest villages of the country.”
In addition, “there are theological power centers in the Shiite-Islamic seminaries surrounding the holy sites in Mashhad and Qom.
“It is this polymorphic structure that explains why the Israel-US assassination campaign hasn’t disrupted the ability of Iran to govern the country, certainly for now.”
Sooner or later a new supreme leader will have to be appointed. The constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran lays down a precise process.
In theory, a serving leader designates his preferred successor, whose appointment after his death is subject to approval by the Assembly of Experts — a panel of 88 Islamic jurists.
The Assembly of Experts building in Qom was itself struck on Tuesday as regime clerics were gathering to elect a new supreme leader, according to local media. At the time of writing, it was not immediately clear who was inside. If confirmed, the attack is likely to delay the process further.
“I don’t know that a date has been set,” said RUSI’s Ozcelik. “I think the language being used is that it would be ‘in the near future.’
“But there will be security concerns around a physical meeting of key clerical figures that would certainly be on the radar of American and Israeli intelligence and, given the circumstances, I think the regime can continue to justify not a delay but a considered longer timeline.”
It remains unknown who, if anyone, Khamenei had designated as his successor. If he had not, it might fall to the Assembly of Experts to pick someone.
The field of candidates is larger than it once was. Under the original terms of the constitution, framed after the 1979 revolution, a supreme leader had to be chosen from among the pool of Grand Ayatollahs.
That changed when Ayatollah Khomeini’s original choice to succeed him, Grand Ayatollah Hussein Ali Montazeri, fell out of favor and was dropped from the succession after he began to publicly criticize some of the violent excesses of the regime.
The constitution was then amended, opening up the field of succession beyond the limited cohort of Grand Ayatollahs, which allowed Khomeini to designate Khamenei as his successor. The Assembly of Experts endorsed his choice on June 3, 1989.
In the meantime, Iran is being run, as dictated by the constitution, by a three-man council. The council, which was formed on Sunday, consists of President Masoud Pezeshkian, judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, and senior cleric Alireza Arafi.
In theory, these are the men that US President Donald Trump would be talking to should the US decide to reopen negotiations. However, Tuesday’s attack on the Presidential Office suggests no one in the regime is safe.
“I don’t know if these three are actually targets,” said Ozcelik. “Although I think that would be consistent with what we’ve seen from the Israelis’ point of view.
“But I’m not sure how helpful it would be to take out a figure such as President Pezeshkian, who in Iranian terms is a moderate, and a potential point of contact with whom Trump and his administration could have talks going forward.
“And whenever this concludes, there will need to be someone in Tehran who is able to pick up the phone when Trump calls.”
Who that might be right now is as much a question of who remains alive as anything else, said Mona Yacoubian, director and senior adviser of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
“I’m going to guess that the US would engage with those with whom they’ve engaged in the past, whether it’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, or possibly Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council,” she said.
“Those are, I think, the two key people I would highlight, which doesn’t necessarily overlap with that Transitional Council.”
That said, as the death toll among Iranian leaders continues to mount, it could be that no one is now safe.
“And the message that sends is one of regime change,” said Yacoubian. “That’s what the US and Israel in particular have been focused on.
“We have heard President Trump, in one of his many different interactions with various members of the media, note that the US had identified successors, and that those successors had been killed.
“I think that about sums it up, and that’s why I think that any public naming of a supreme leader may not come for some time.”
She added: “In some ways, it’s not clear how important that is at this point. I think the focus in Iran right now is very much on maintaining regime cohesion, such as it exists.
“The military and security circles have long been engaged on these questions and have been thinking through this type of scenario planning.
“So I don’t know how significant it is that we have yet to hear of a new supreme leader being named because these other centers of power, which have long existed in Iran, were likely already planning for a post-Khamenei transition well before this current conflict started, and they are clearly still acting and working, perhaps in a decentralized way.
“So yes, there have been decapitation strikes. But what that actually means in terms of how the system in Iran is operating is unclear.”
