Ballots over Beirut

Beirut

AFTER TWO ROUNDS OF PARLIAMENTARY ELECTIONS with little competition between candidates and consequently very low voter turnout, the third round of the Lebanese political season featured a vigorous battle between General Michel Aoun, just returned from almost 15 years of exile in Paris, and a coalition including Druze leader Walid Jumblatt, Saad Hariri, son of the assassinated former prime minister, and the Lebanese Forces, a Christian party. Aoun trounced his competitors, and surprised even himself by winning 21 seats (out of 128) in Lebanon's first post-Syrian occupation government. The general's poor showing in the fourth and final round last week can hardly obscure the fact that his bloc constitutes an opposition power center, one that the more established political players--including Hariri's group, Jumblatt, Hezbollah, and Amal (the Shiite militia)--will now have to reckon with. Aoun's hard-won seats are a tangible sign that democracy really is taking root in this country.

I met with Aoun shortly after his third-week victories in his villa in Rabieh, a town high in the mountains about 30 minutes north of Beirut. He is a robust and energetic 70 years, and smaller than the televised image of the man who took on the Syrian army 15 years ago and is now embarked on the equally daunting, and perhaps thankless, task of reconfiguring postwar Lebanon's political culture.

"Our democracy is very primitive," Aoun says. "It's the worst form of democracy--no laws are implemented, a bad electoral law, there's no separation between powers. I want to modernize this democracy." He's just finished lunch, and I ask him if his headstrong approach is why he's being portrayed as a divisive figure, someone who's driving a wedge into the national unity engendered by the "Cedar Revolution."

"Whoa!" he says, his eyes widening behind his narrow glass frames. He seems almost wounded by the question, a strange reaction for a political figure whose often aggressive rhetoric, anticorruption crusade, and impatience with the local press is reminiscent of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Among Aoun's first words upon his May 7 return from exile in France was a request for the assembled press corps to "shut up." However, as with Giuliani, few people doubt his integrity.

Aoun hands me a pamphlet, "The Alternative," detailing the reform initiatives of his party, the Free Patriotic Movement. They cover such areas as public education, the environment, independence of the judiciary, freedom of speech and assembly. These are all the subjects Arab liberals agree need to be tackled across the region but will rarely discuss openly, never mind publish. Aoun boasts that "this is the first time a Lebanese political party has presented a written program, not just verbal promises. We have to fulfill it."

Aoun's camp is staffed mostly by volunteers, some of them wearing orange, his party's color, and the "new black" of democracy movements across the world. It's clear that the general's energy and forthrightness have inspired large parts of a community accustomed to double-dealing, and multiple discourses (depending on which confessional community is being addressed--or targeted). To his supporters, Aoun signals a break with that kind of local, even tribal, leadership. Says American University of Beirut professor Farid al-Khazen, a newly elected deputy who ran on Aoun's list: "He's a Christian who has large popularity within the Muslim community, and his political discourse is very much national in focus."

"I'm aware of what I represent for Lebanese people of all confessions," Aoun says. "I'm a guy who looks out for the interests of his country, and after 15 years of exile is still popular. The Lebanese look at me as a unique figure in their history. Or, that's what I hear from them," he says somewhat self-consciously after skipping a beat. "I don't say that about me--you can ask them."