Tag Archives: suleiman

Why Beirut matters too

The Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque and the Saint George Maronite Cathedral stand side by side in Martyr's Square in downtown Beirut. (Kevin Lees)
The Mohammad Al-Amin Mosque and the Saint George Maronite Cathedral stand side by side in Martyr’s Square in downtown Beirut. (Kevin Lees)

I’ve seen plenty of commentary online since Friday night criticizing the American and European media (and their audiences) for ignoring Thursday’s terrorist attacks in Beirut while focusing their attention solely on Friday’s deadlier Paris attacks.Lebanon

But, as I write tomorrow for The National Interest, as the world mourns the victims of both attacks, there’s a risk that the lessons of the Beirut blasts (by far the worst since the beginning of the civil war in neighboring Syria) will go unheeded.

Just as the Paris attacks are changing the nature of the Western response to ISIS/Daesh, so should the Beirut attacks change the nature of Western engagement with Lebanon.

Recognizing the humanity of the victims in Lebanon is really just the first step, because the real courage among policymakers is to adjust to the post-attack Beirut with more support politically, economically and morally.

Do read the whole thing here.

I argue first that U.S. and European policymakers should care about Lebanon and its stability:  Continue reading Why Beirut matters too

Suleiman is gone, and Lebanon still has no president

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Lebanon’s president Michel Suleiman left office on May 25, but even as the country struggles to contain the chaos — political, humanitarian and otherwise — that’s spilled over from Syria’s four-year civil war. Lebanon

Earlier today, Nabih Berri, the speaker of Lebanon’s national assembly (مجلس النواب), scheduled the seventh vote since April 23, to elect Suleiman’s successor.

Like the last six ballots, there wasn’t even be a quorum for the vote. Berri has scheduled the eighth attempt for July 2.

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RELATED: Lebanon’s parliament considers
presidential choice tomorrow


RELATED
: In first ballot, Lebanon’s parliament fails
to elect new president

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Given that it took ten months for prime minister Tammam Salam to form a new government in February, and that Salam’s unity government came together almost solely for the rationale of getting Lebanon through the presidential election and through a new electoral law and fresh parliamentary elections, there’s no telling how long the standoff could last — perhaps months or even well into 2015.

After former president Émile Lahoud left office in November 2007, it took another six month — until May 25, 2008 — to elect his successor, Suleiman (pictured above).

Though the Lebanese presidency is largely ceremonial, it’s a vital component of the fragile balancing of confessional interests in a country with 18 officially recognized ‘confessions’ — or religious groups. Lebanon’s president must be a Maronite Christian, while its prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of the Assemblée nationale (National Assembly) must be a Shiite Muslim. Of the 128 members of the National Assembly, 64 must be Muslim and 64 must be Christian.

In the meanwhile, Christian parties have said that they will boycott the national assembly’s sessions until a new president is chosen, arguing that the priority for Lebanon should be electing a new president, not routine legislation. That, in turn, makes it less likely that the Salam government can accomplish much of anything until Lebanon has a new president — and there’s no assurance that a new president will be in place in time for parliamentary elections scheduled (for now) to take place in November.

The problem is that Lebanon isn’t Belgium — on balance, it’s not great news for Lebanese governance that it has a caretaker government, with no hope of electing a president and no hope of holding parliamentary elections, which last took place in April 2009. That’s true in ‘normal’ times, but it’s especially true as Lebanon’s government works to hold off further violent spillover from the Syrian civil war, which has ignited sectarian tension in Beirut, Tripoli and elsewhere in Lebanon. The government is also struggling to accommodate over one million Syrian refugees currently living in Lebanon — that’s a staggering amount for a country that only had around 4.5 million people to begin with.

So why can’t Lebanon elect a new president?

Continue reading Suleiman is gone, and Lebanon still has no president

Was the Syrian election more successful than Egypt’s?

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A month ago, I scoffed at the idea of holding a presidential election in Syria at a time of civil war, with a pre-determined outcome, while millions of Syrians are living outside the country as refugees, and when fighting is still raging throughout much of Syria.Syria Flag Icon

But a quick look at the turnout indicates that it may have been hasty to discount the election as an exercise in futility — especially coming so soon after a flawed Egyptian presidential election where apathy reigned.

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RELATED: Why is Syria holding a presidential election in the middle of a civil war?

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There’s no doubt that the Syrian vote fails by any standard of a free and fair election — by American terms, by European terms, by Indian terms, by Indonesian terms. There was no question that Bashar al-Assad (pictured above), who has been Syria’s president since 2000, would win the vote, just like his father, Hafez al-Assad, remained in power since 1971, typically with somewhat predictable support:

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Still, it’s incredible that Syria, where parts of the country still remain under rebel control, the race officially commanded turnout of 73.42%. If those numbers are to be trusted, and that’s a huge question, it means that Syrian turnout, at a time of war, was around 25% higher than turnout in Egypt’s presidential election last week. Stunningly, there are reports of thousands of Syrian refugees living across the border in Lebanon streaming back into Syria earlier this week to take part in the elections. Now, there are also reports that Syrian workers have been essentially forced en masse onto buses to vote:

“Of course I’m voting for Assad. First of all, I can’t not go vote because at work we’re all taken by bus to the polling booth. Second, I don’t know these other candidates. And also, I live here and have no options to leave – I don’t know what would happen if I don’t vote for Assad,” said a teacher in Damascus, contacted on Skype.

But if the point of the election was a show of strength and mobilization among Syrians living within territory that Assad currently controls, the Syrian regime can credibly claim some kind of victory, if not necessarily a democratic mandate.

Whatever the truth, it’s more than the ‘great big zero’ that US secretary of state John Kerry declared it yesterday in a hasty  trip to Lebanon, which is still stuck in the middle of a presidential crisis that began last month and that has continued since former president Michel Suleiman left office on May 25.   Continue reading Was the Syrian election more successful than Egypt’s?

In first ballot, Lebanon’s parliament fails to elect new president

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As expected, none of Lebanon’s presidential candidates emerged today with the two-third majority required to succeed Michel Suleiman as the next Lebanese president.Lebanon

Suleiman’s term is scheduled to end on May 25, and Lebanon’s parliament today held the first of what is expected to be several ballots to choose a successor. Under Lebanon’s confessional system, its president has traditionally been a Maronite Christian.

The ‘March 8 bloc,’ which includes Hezbollah and Lebanon’s other Shiite parties, some Sunni Lebanese and the Free Patriotic Movement of Maronite leader Michel Aoun, all cast blank ballots.

The ‘March 14 bloc,’ which includes Saad Hariri’s Sunni Future Movement and Lebanon’s other Maronite parties, supported Samir Geagea, the leader of the Lebanon Forces.

Walid Jumblatt, who leads Lebanon’s political Druze community, supported Henry Helou.

As I wrote yesterday, the first round is largely seen as a testing ground for the strength of the various blocs. Starting with the next round, a candidate needs to win a simple majority (65) in order to win the presidency. If the blank votes correspond neatly to the March 8 coalition’s strength, it means that neither a March 8-backed Aoun candidacy nor a March 14-backed Geagea candidacy will win without appealing to Jumblatt and the Druze community. Aoun and Geagea, both controversial, are longtime rivals, dating back to the Lebanese civil war of the late 1970s and 1980s.

That means that it’s likely that a consensus candidate might emerge, possibly including army commander Jean Kahwagi, central bank president Riad Salameh, or former minister Ziad Baroud.

The presidential vote is the first major decision of the national unity government of prime minister Tammam Salam, which formed in February after ten months of tough negotiations. Lebanon’s next president will face strong pressures as Syria’s civil war enters its fourth year, with elevated tensions between Lebanese Sunni and Shiite constituencies, and with a deluge of Syria refugees challenging Lebanon’s infrastructural capacity.

Lebanon’s parliament considers presidential choice tomorrow

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aounWith the term of Lebanese president Michel Suleiman set to expire on May 25, the country’s 128-member parliament will convene tomorrow, April 23, for the first of what will likely be weeks of voting and negotiating to select a replacement.Lebanon

Though the president has less day-to-day power over Lebanese governance, it’s a vital post at a time when national unity is stretched to its limits and Syria nears the third anniversary of the start of a brutal civil war that falls along precarious sectarian lines. Syria’s conflict has brought a massive wave of refugees into Lebanon, and it’s also caused significant unrest from Tripoli to Beirut, with some Shiite Lebanese intervening on behalf of the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad and some Sunni Lebanese intervening on behalf of anti-Assad rebels.

Though Suleiman has only served as Lebanon’s president since 2007, his increasingly critical remarks against Hezbollah (حزب الله‎), the powerful social, political and military Shiite organization, have made it unlikely that he’ll win reelection. Hezbollah, among all of Lebanon’s political groups, has taken the boldest and most consequential steps into the Syrian war in support of Assad.

The presidential vote follows the successful formation of a new government in February, which itself followed ten months of difficult negotiations guided by Lebanon’s current prime minister Tammam Salam. The national unity government includes ministers from the ‘March 8’ bloc,* the ‘March 14’ bloc and top Druze leader Walid Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party (الحزب التقدمي الاشتراكي‎), which has switched between the March 8 and March 14 camps throughout the past five years.

Under Lebanon’s complex confessional system, whereby 64 seats in Lebanon’s national assembly (مجلس النواب) are reserved each for Muslims and for Christians, the presidency traditionally goes to a Maronite Christian, the premiership to a Sunni Muslim and the speakership of the national assembly to a Shiite Muslim.

That means that the race will feature some of Lebanon’s most prominent Maronite leaders. But with a two-thirds majority required to win the presidency, no one believes that Lebanon will choose its next president anytime soon. (In the second round of voting, a candidate needs only a simple majority to win the presidency.)

Right now, the only major declared candidate is Samir Geagea (pictured above, top), the leader of the Lebanese Forces (القوات اللبنانية‎). For now, at least, Geagea is the candidate backed by the entire cross-confessional March 14 coalition. But Geagea isn’t the most uniting candidate, even within the March 14 camp. He’s unlikely to wield enough support, even in the second round, to win enough over votes from the March 8 coalition, which will likely cast blank ballots in tomorrow’s vote. The March 8 bloc’s top choice for the presidency will almost certainly be Michel Aoun (pictured above, bottom), the leader of the Free Patriotic Movement (التيار الوطني الحر‎), the most prominent Maronite group within the March 8 alliance.

As it stands, the first round is more important for establishing the relative strength of each bloc than for electing a president outright — to that degree, both Geagea and Aoun (to the extent casting a blank vote is casting a blank vote for Aoun) represent stalking horses for the March 14 and March 8 camps. Continue reading Lebanon’s parliament considers presidential choice tomorrow

Lebanon’s new government cause for guarded optimism

salam

No one had high hopes that Tammam Salam would form a new government for Lebanon, and now that he has, the expectations for the Salam government are low — that he’ll see Lebanon through to a presidential election in May and parliamentary elections that have been delayed since last year.Lebanon

Ten months after the resignation of former prime minister Najib Mikati, Salam has assembled a national unity government that tries to bring together elements within the ‘March 8’ coalition sympathetic to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, including the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, and other elements within the ‘March 14’ coalition that have closer ties to the West and sympathies for the Syrian rebels in a civil war that’s soon to enter its fourth year.  The Syrian conflict has flared occasionally in Lebanon as well, with anti-Assad Sunni Lebanese and pro-Assad Shiite Lebanese clashing in Beirut and other cities.  At the end of 2013,  the assassination of prominent ‘March 14’ leader and former US ambassador Mohamed Chatah only underlined the fragility of Lebanon’s security.

The new 24-member Cabinet allocates eight positions to the ‘March 8’ coalition, nine positions to the ‘March 14’ coalition and seven more positions to those close to Salam, top Druze leader Walid Jumblatt and outgoing Lebanese president Michel Suleiman.

Salam must still reach a compromise over his government’s ‘policy statement,’ which will likely include little more than caretaker steps to get Lebanon its next elections and attention to ameliorating the growing crisis for Syrian refugees that have fled their country for Lebanon.  His government must then win a confidence vote in the parliament — an outcome not entirely ensured if the two competing blocs can’t agree to even the most basic guiding policy statement.

Last month, former prime minister Saad Hariri, the leader of the Future Movement, a top party within the ‘March 14’ coalition, and the son of the late former prime minister Rafic Hariri, backed away from his opposition to participating in a government that also includes Hezbollah.

Hezbollah, which is openly backing Assad in Syria, now faces violent repercussions throughout Lebanon, with Shiite-dominated areas of Beirut and southern Lebanon increasingly targeted by Sunni militants in retribution for Hezbollah’s efforts in Syria.  Hariri, who has been living outside Lebanon for the past two years out of fears for his safety.

The tentative breakthrough between Hezbollah and the Hariri bloc could pave the way for future cooperation over electing Suleiman’s successor, enacting a new election law and, most importantly of all, reducing the sectarian tension that still threatens to engulf Lebanon.

Accomplishing much in the next three months, however, won’t be incredibly easy — meaning that the chief accomplishment of the Salam government might be the fact that it even exists. Continue reading Lebanon’s new government cause for guarded optimism

Lebanon’s political community unites against blast apparently targeting Hezbollah

haririgeagea

Generally, the depressingly familiar storyline in Lebanon goes something like this:Lebanon

First, the powerful Shiite political organization Hezbollah does something outrageous with respect to opposing Israel or supporting Bashar al-Assad in Syria.  In doing so, Hezbollah makes it clear that not only is it willing to prioritize its own international policy over maintaining Lebanese unity, but that it has sufficient military and political power to do so no matter what anyone else in Lebanon thinks.  Finally, everyone else in the Lebanon grumbles at Hezbollah for usurping the military and political roles that should properly belong to the Lebanese government, and in so doing, jeopardizing the fragile national unity that everyone else in Lebanon has been boosting since the end of Lebanon’s own civil war in the 1980s.

It was Hezbollah, after all, that was responsible for rope-a-doping Israel into the 2006 summer war — though it turns out that Hezbollah was successful in forcing an end to Israeli military occupation in southern Lebanon, it was Hezbollah (not the Lebanese government) that decided that it was appropriate to provoke Israel into a months-long bombing campaign that destabilized all of Lebanon, not just the southern Shiite strongholds where Hezbollah’s influence is strongest.

That storyline has become increasingly complicated with Sunni groups that are now becoming more ‘Hezbollah-like’ in prioritizing their support of (largely Sunni) anti-Assad rebels in the Syrian civil war as Hezbollah has made it clear that it will openly and notoriously support the Assad regime, thereby risking Lebanese unity even more.  But by and large, the story of Lebanon’s attempt to stay out of trouble in the Middle East over the past decade has involved trying to pull Hezbollah back from the ledge.

So while no one ever welcomes a bomb blast of the kind that Lebanon suffered yesterday — a blast in the largely Shiite southern suburbs of Beirut that killed up to 20 people and injured nearly 300– it is heartening to see that the response from the entire political community in Lebanon has been to condemn the bombing.  Though a murky, heretofore unknown group calling themselves the ‘Brigade of Aisha, the Mother of the Faithful’ took credit for the attack, it could have been any number of Hezbollah’s enemies — radical Sunni groups within Lebanon, anti-Assad rebels from Syria angry at Hezbollah’s growing role in propping up Assad or, perhaps more outlandishly, Israeli special agents who want to take Hezbollah down a peg or two (as Lebanese president Michel Suleiman appeared to suggest yesterday).

The larger point here isn’t who was responsible for a bomb that seems squarely aimed at Hezbollah, but that even when the shoe is on the other foot, when it’s Hezbollah that’s the victim and not the instigator of violence in Lebanon — even despite its role as a wayward force that causes all sorts of problems for everyone else in Lebanon who just want to live their lives peacefully and in harmony — the attack is condemned not only by Lebanese Shi’a, but by mainstream Sunni and Maronite leaders as well.  Former prime minister Saad Hariri, who is about as strong an opponent of Hezbollah as anyone, denounced the attack, as did Samir Geagea (pictured above, left, with Hariri, right), the leader of the Lebanese Forces, a Maronite group.

and Christian Maronite (president Michel Suleiman) leaders who are certainly do not count themselves among Hezbollah’s fans.

If there’s one silver lining to Thursday’s attack, it’s that the Lebanese political community had an opportunity to show Hezbollah and its supporters that national unity means just that — when you attack one group of Lebanese, you attack all of them, despite the fact that there are many, many differences among Lebanon’s myriad political and religious communities.  It’s a subtle point, but it’s important, and it’s one of the reasons why Lebanon (much to its credit) has avoided much of the blowback from Syria’s destabilizing civil war.

Egypt 2013 is not Algeria 1991 (whew!), but that’s bad news for Egyptian democracy

elsisi

Among the groups that wield real power in Egypt, democracy turns out to be not so incredibly popular.Algeria_Flag_Iconegypt_flag_new

No matter what U.S. secretary of state John Kerry says and no matter what Egypt’s army chief Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi (pictured above) believes, the military effort to push Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s first democratically elected president, from office was hardly a lesson in preserving democracy.  Militaries in healthy democracies, Middle Eastern or otherwise, do not respond to public protests by ousting elected governments.

But Morsi, by pushing through a new constitution without ample debate last December and attempting to assume near-dictatorial powers in order to do so, and more recently trying to stack the ranks of Egypt’s regional governments with rank-and-file Muslim Brotherhood members, showed that he also lacked enthusiasm for civic participation.

What’s happening in Egypt today is starting to resemble a revolutionary moment less and less.  Instead, it looks more like the same cat-and-mouse game that the powerful Egyptian military (and the ever-lurking, so-called ‘deep state’), with ties to the United States and a knack for secular realpolitik, has been playing with the today-confrontational, tomorrow-conciliatory Muslim Brotherhood for decades.

In short, Egypt 2013 looks a lot like Egypt 2003. Or 1993. Or even 1973.  The Muslim Brotherhood and the countervailing political-military structure have been repeating the same game year after year, decade after decade.

That’s good news for those who are worrying that Egypt looks a lot like Algeria 1991 instead.

The Egypt-Algeria analogy looms ominously today, so it’s worth considering the similarities in some detail.  After nearly three decades of rule by the National Liberation Front (FLN, جبهة التحرير الوطني), the guerrilla-group-turned-ruling-party that once liberated Algeria from the French during the bloody war of independence in the 1950s and the early 1960s, Algerians had grown unruly over their country’s progress.  On the back of popular protests against Algeria’s government in 1989 over poor economic conditions, officials instituted local elections in 1990.  The surprise winner of those elections was the Islamic Salvation Front, a hastily constructed coalition of disparate Islamic elements.

When the Algerian government held national elections in December 1991 to elect a new parliament, the Islamic Salvation Front performed even better, winning 188 out of 231 seats in the first round of the election.  The Algerian military promptly canceled the second round of the elections and retroactively canceled the first round, to the relief of the ruling elite that comprised the Algerian pouvoir.  The decision also relieved diplomats in Paris and, especially, Washington, where policymakers on the cusp of winning the Cold War did not envision that the new pax Americana should involve landslide victories throughout the Muslim world for Islamic fundamentalists who had no real passion for democracy.  As Edward Djerejian scoffed at the time, a victory for the Islamists might amount to ‘one man, one vote, one time.’

The military quickly ousted Algeria’s 13-year ruler Chadli Bendjedid for good measure, then banned the Islamic Salvation Front and instituted military rule.

Sound familiar?

The comparison is particularly worrisome because Algeria’s Islamists fought back with full force and the country descended into a bloody civil war.  Although the military subdued what had become an Islamist guerrilla force by the end of the 1990s, strongman Abdelaziz Bouteflika took power in 1999, he remains in power (if not in great health) today, and Algeria has been a semi-authoritarian state ever since.  So much for Algeria’s short-lived foray into democracy.

But if there is reason to believe that Egypt is merely falling back into long-established familiar patterns between the military and the Islamists, which have tussled for years without escalating their differences into a full-fledged civil war, and that bodes well for Egypt’s short-term and medium-term stability.

Sure, the faces and the names have changed.  Hosni Mubarak’s sclerotic three-decade reign is firmly in the past, Mohamed Hussein Tantawi was forced into retirement, Omar Suleiman died, and Ahmed Shafiq lost the June 2012 presidential runoff to Morsi.  But a new coterie of secular and military power-brokers, like El-Sisi and newly enthroned vice president Mohamed ElBaradei have risen in their stead and maybe one day, nationalist neo-Nasserite Hamdeen Sabahi and Ambien-variety Muslim democrats like Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh.  Egypt’s priority now is to keep either side from any radical lurches.  But as long as El-Sisi doesn’t launch a wholesale slaughter of Muslim Brotherhood protesters, it seems unlikely that Egypt could unravel into the kind of civil war that plagued Algeria for a decade.

The bad news is that doesn’t bode well for Egypt’s experiment in democracy over the past two years.   Continue reading Egypt 2013 is not Algeria 1991 (whew!), but that’s bad news for Egyptian democracy

Mikati’s resignation need not set off immediate alarms about Lebanon’s future

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In Lebanon, elections are both much less and much more than what we typically think of as elections. Lebanon

Given that the country’s constitution mandates that the prime minister is always a Sunni Muslim, the president a Maronite Christian and the speaker of the national assembly a Shi’a Muslim, it’s not a surprise that parliamentary elections are a carefully stage-managed process of allocating seats to Lebanon’s national assembly (مجلس النواب) to ensure half of the seats (64) go to Muslims and another half (64) go to Christians — specific allocations guarantee a set number of seats for each of Lebanon’s 22 confessionals.

So the resignation of Lebanon’s prime minister Najib Mikati (pictured above) on Friday should be seen as a prologue to the electoral choreography, given that new elections are due in June when the current parliamentary terms ends.  Lebanon’s president Michel Suleiman has accepted Mikati’s resignation, but asked Mikati to stay on as a caretaker prime minister until a new prime minister can be announced.

It should not necessarily be seen as a warning sign that Lebanon is invariably descending into chaos or that it is doomed to be drawn into Syria’s civil war, notwithstanding the latest clashes in Tripoli, which seem to have quieted since the weekend.

Tripoli, Lebanon’s second-largest city on its northern coast near the Syrian border, is especially geared toward tension, with its own Sunni majority and Alawite minority mirroring the demographic dynamic in Syria.  But despite some high-profile kidnappings in the Bekaa Valley last August, and flare-ups from time to time in Tripoli, Lebanon has done a reasonable job in avoiding the same fate as Syria.

That’s in no small part due to the resolve of many (though not all) of Lebanon’s political elite to keep Lebanon from returning to the era of civil war that devastated the country in the late 1970s and 1980s, though as the Syrian civil war approaches its two-year anniversary, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Lebanese leaders to remain neutral in the conflict.  That became especially true after a car bomb blast in Beirut last October killed Lebanon’s top intelligence official, Wissam al-Hassan, a longtime Hariri ally — his assassination is widely believed to have been engineered by Syrian — or even Hezbollah (حزب الله‎) — forces.  Hezbollah is also widely believed of actively supporting Bashar al-Assad’s regime with military force inside Syria, because Assad (together with Iran’s regime) are the two major lines of political and monetary support for Hezbollah.  If Assad falls in Syria, Hezbollah will no longer be able to look to Damascus for patronage.

So while Mikati’s resignation need not mean an irreparable retreat for Lebanon, it nonetheless portends a difficult few months ahead — the key stumbling block is agreeing to an election law in advance of elections or, at minimum, the agreement for an electoral supervision body to oversee the planned June 9 poll.  Another solution might include the extension of a national unity government with a minor delay of the elections.

The next step lies with Suleiman, who could call a ‘national dialogue’ among all of Lebanon’s political leaders in hopes of achieving at least a caretaker government to see through the implementation of a law that will clear the path for new elections.   Continue reading Mikati’s resignation need not set off immediate alarms about Lebanon’s future

Former Mubarak intelligence chief Omar Suleiman has died

Omar Suleiman has died at 77, while undergoing medical tests in the United States.

He will not be missed among Egypt’s revolution-minded citizens, and he will be remembered both for the human rights violations that he is alleged to have committed as Egypt’s top intelligence chief for decades.  I think most of all, he’ll be remembered for his visible role as the vice president in the last, hectic days of Hosni Mubarak’s regime.  When the end came for the regime, it was Suleiman’s glassy face we remember, hours before the military brass issued its Communiqué No. 1, bringing the curtain down.

But recall that Suleiman was disqualified — along with several other top candidates — for the presidential race.  In the wake of that decision, former Mubarak prime minister Ahmed Shafiq effectively consolidated the pro-security, pro-military sector of the electorate to place second in the first round of the presidential election on May 23 and 24, and he only narrowly lost the runoff on June 16 and 17.

Had Suleiman not been disqualified, he may well have won the voters that ultimately supported Shafiq and perhaps had a real shot at winning the Egyptian presidency.

It’s hard to imagine how Egypt’s transfer could be any bumpier than it’s been, but it’s worth pausing to note that a Suleiman victory would have been an even greater disaster.  In addition to what would have been a controversial return of the felool — ‘remnants’ — of the old regime to power, Egypt would today be dealing with the fallout of that president’s death in office just three weeks after his inauguration.

Instead, we are awaiting the appointment of Mohammed Morsi’s prime minister, and Egypt’s Administrative Court has passed on the opportunity to disrupt the work of the Constituent Assembly, the group that is drafting Egypt’s new constitution.

Early returns indicate a likely Morsi-Shafiq runoff

UPDATE: 11:25 a.m. Cairo time.  With nearly 20 million votes counted, it looks like Morsi is leading with 26.9% and Shafiq is second with 24.2%. Sabahi is in third place with 19.4%, Aboul Fatouh is close behind with 17.9%, and Moussa lags far in fifth place with 11.2%.

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It’s still not official, Giza and Cairo returns are yet to be counted, and early returns are just that — early — but it’s looking increasingly like the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohammed Morsi has done fairly well, and that his opponent in the June runoff could well be Hosni Mubarak’s former prime minister and Air Force commander and civil aviation minister Ahmed Shafiq after a first round that could see any of five candidates emerge for the June 16-17 runoff.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been increasingly confident as the counting has gotten underway — even in a country like Egypt, which is undergoing its first free and fair presidential election in history, campaigns generally are not this cocky unless they are pretty certain of victory.

If indeed Shafiq is headed for a top-two finish, it would explain why former Arab League secretary-general and former Mubarak foreign minister Amr Moussa picked such an odd fight with Shafiq, calling for Shafiq to drop out of the race in the middle of the two-day voting window.  In essence, Moussa may have been trying an 11th hour to paint Shafiq as the true ‘felool’ candidate of the race — the ‘remnants’ of the Mubarak era, attempting to undermine his voter base at the last minute.

As Ian Black wrote earlier for The Guardian, this is sort of a worst-case scenario for Egypt, a runoff between a ‘felool’ Mubarak deep-state retread versus the most conservative Islamist (and Muslim Brotherhood-approved) candidate in the race:

Mubarak’s last prime minister and former commander of the air force is described pejoratively by opponents as the “fuloul” – regime remnant – candidate. This run-off is the nightmare scenario because many people hate both men. A contest between them would be a highly polarised choice that would take Egyptians back to the bad old days before the revolution. The Brotherhood would mobilise massively behind Morsi, with the army and police supporting Shafiq. Violence would be highly likely to erupt. Abstention rates would soar.

A Morsi-Shafiq runoff would remind me of the Peruvian election in 2011, when leftist Ollanta Humala and Keiko Fujimori (daughter of the former Peruvian dictator) advanced to the second round runoff, while moderates Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, Alejandro Toledo and Luis Castañeda split the moderate vote.  Mario Vargas Llosa, Peru’s Nobel laureate, likened it to a choice “between AIDS and cancer.”

If Egypt is indeed headed for a Morsi-Shafiq runoff, I think it indicates that we would have been otherwise seeing a runoff between two even more controversial candidates, had they not been disqualified in May: former Mubarak intelligence chief Omar Suleiman and Mubarak’s vice president in the final days of February 2011, and Salafist preacher Hazem Abu Ismail or perhaps even the Muslim Brotherhood’s first presidential candidate Khairat al-Shater.  Suleiman would have appealed to the same “security first” voters that Shafiq has attracted.  Abu Ismail was, as Morsi is now, the most conservative Islamist in the race — Abu Ismail was, in fact, much more conservative than al-Shater — in the same way, Morsi is a more conservative Islamist than his rival Islamist Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, (forget for a moment that Aboul Fotouh, confusingly, has been endorsed by the more conservative Salafist Al-Nour Party and not by the relatively more moderate Muslim Brotherhood, of which he was a member until just last year).

In any event, a Morsi-Shafiq runoff would indicate that the May 15 disqualifications were the absolute pivotal turning point in the presidential race, for what it’s worth.

It would also indicate that, despite Egyptian frustration with the parliament’s dithering after January elections that saw the Brotherhood win nearly half of the parliament’s seats, the Brotherhood is clearly the most potent and organized political force in Egypt today.  Morsi is neither the most charismatic nor the most accomplished candidate in the race — if he emerges not only in the runoff, but as the top choice in the first round, it will indicate that the Brotherhood has even more impressive organization and political muscle than we thought.

Abdoul Fatouh v. Moussa v. Morsi v. Sabahi v. Shafiq: five vie for two runoff slots in unpredictable Egyptian race

Egyptians go to the polls today and tomorrow to cast votes in a presidential election unprecedented in not only Egypt, but the Middle East.

Since the disqualification of three of the top candidates just one month ago, the bumpy race has settled into a vibe that has electrified the 82 million citizens of the world’s largest Arab nation, the latest and, perhaps, greatest act in a drama that began with the protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that led to the downfall of longtime strongman Hosni Mubarak in February 2011. 

Polls have shown any number of candidates in the lead, and two weeks ago, two of the presumed frontrunners, Amr Moussa (above, right) and Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh (above, left), sparred in Egypt’s first-ever presidential debate.  But they are not the only candidates with a chance to win the presidency.

The truth is that, for all the interest — both in Egypt and abroad — no one knows who will emerge as Egypt’s next president (which is in itself a fascinating statement on the success Egypt’s democratic transition).  The only safe prediction is that this week’s vote will result in no candidate winning over 50% of the vote, necessitating a runoff among the top two winners on June 16 and 17.

Any of the top five candidates could advance to the runoff — including also Mohammed Morsi, Hamdeen Sabahi and Ahmed Shafiq: Continue reading Abdoul Fatouh v. Moussa v. Morsi v. Sabahi v. Shafiq: five vie for two runoff slots in unpredictable Egyptian race

Disqualifications reshape Egyptian presidential race

This weekend’s decision by Egypt’s Presidential Elections Commission to disqualify ten candidates (out of 23) in the upcoming Egyptian presidential election on May 23 — including the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, a former top official of Hosni Mubarak’s regime and another popular Salafist candidate — appears to have closed a topsy-turvy chapter in the race.

The latest drama started when Salafist preacher Hazem Abu Ismail (above, top) began gaining traction in the race.  A hardline Islamist, Abu Ismail’s campaign targeted a smaller role for the Egyptian military in public life and a correspondingly greater role for Islam.  A proponent of Iranian-style reforms, he would make the veil mandatory for women.  He also advocated a ban on alcohol consumption, including for foreign tourists, and the closing of gambling casinos, currently open to foreigners.

While this hardline agenda is fairly popular with not just a few Egyptians, it essentially terrified everyone else in Egypt — from the secular military to Egypt’s vocal minority of Coptic Christians to the tourism industry, which would rather not scare away any more Western visitors.  Meanwhile, the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood, which had previously pledged not to field a candidate for the presidential election, also saw Abu Ismail as a threat.  In sitting out the presidential election, it ceded to Abu Ismail the full spectrum of Islamists, conservative and moderate.  But, more existentially, as Abu Ismail’s tone and support began to sound alarm among those who want to perpetuate Egyptian’s secular state, it risked being lumped together with the Salafists. Continue reading Disqualifications reshape Egyptian presidential race