Is it a Mass Failure but an individual success?

In his quick speech evaluating the Lebanese election, Hezbollah’s Secretary-General just said that the votes of the resistance supporters came as “a message to the entire world that armed resistance is neither an armed party’s choice, nor a choice of an armed gang, but a popular choice and an expression of the people's will that must be respected».

This is true, in particular when the Shiite vote in south Lebanon, the northern Bekaa and the southern suburbs of Beirut came in favour of this choice. This wide support base is the main pillar of the Lebanese popular protection of the party’s choices. This is regardless of the party attempts to engage in a useless debate about who has the popular majority, which is nothing but an attempt to reduce the impact of the failure by the opposition to become a Lebanese parliament majority led by the party, which would have become its' backbone and real authority.

The above was put into practice during the elections, when Hezbollah played a major role in putting the opposition’s electoral lists together in many districts, outside of the areas where Hezbollah enjoys the support of the dominant majority. This was also evident in the mobilization of the party’s electoral machine, its halo its excessive self-confidence and the belief that it is invincible and cannot be defeated in the elections.

While there is no question that there is collective Shiite rallying around the party in Lebanon, there was also an urgent need for its supporters to convey to the outside world its response against what Hezbollah’s leaders consider an international campaign aimed against the party. The latter subsequently boasted the election results to show that it indeed has some kind of a popular legitimacy, even when it had been unable to extract a constitutional legitimacy through becoming – along with its allies - a parliamentary majority.

While there is an opinion that the elections did not change anything on the Lebanese scene (another thing that is a subject of debate) because the other party competing in the election has retained its parliamentary majority that it had it in the past four years, the election would have certainly changed a lot of parameters, had Hezbollah - and the opposition - won this majority. Gaining constitutional legitimacy, in addition to popular legitimacy, would have meant a massive gain for Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria, in the context of regional politics, whether these were headed towards negotiations and settlements, or whether they were headed towards confrontation.

Moreover, to say that the party did not want to win the majority because losing would enable it to better manage the situation on the ground - and without having to be at the forefront of events - is contradicted by the excessive self-confidence the opposition had that it will win the elections and then govern. This overconfidence was clearly expressed by Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah and all his party leaders. This probable was the result of the elation they felt following their use of excessive force on the 7th of May, 2008. Despite the fact that this excessive force failed in the ballot box in general, its remnants are still standing in the form of the arrogant disregard of the evident drop in popularity of the party’s Christian ally - leader of the Free Patriotic Movement General Michel Aoun.

This force has also failed in an even more important area: the party's leadership was unable to penetrate the Sunni street, which remained loyal to Mr. Saad al-Hariri. It might be possible to say that while the party is actually the primary loser in the elections, Mr. Hariri is the main victor if the votes he won were compared to those his allies received. Moreover, some of his allies actually lost some of their share of votes. But this of course does not eliminate the adverse effects of a Sunni-versus-Shiite realignment on the situation in Lebanon and the known risks such a position carries with it.

Nevertheless, this mass failure did not prevent the party from sending out a swarm of individual political messages. In addition to the message sent to the outside world that the resistance is a popular choice, many other internal parties received a lot of meaningful insinuations through the ballot box, which can be classified as part of the party’s electoral gains. These messages can be summarized as follows:

1 – A message sent to the President of the Republic, Michel Suleiman, through the Shiite vote in the district of Jbeil, the president's hometown and where he sought to obtain two seats for the independents aligned with him. The message was that Jbeil belongs to the President only geographically, but belongs to the party and its allies, as far as politics are concerned.

2- A message to General Michel Aoun: That his political career now depends completely on the party, given that the Shiite votes that were given to him (and that represent a huge majority in the Shiite community) are what carried his electoral lists to victory in the districts of Jezzine, Baabda, and Jbeil. Some say that as much as a thousand Shiite votes in Keserwan prevented the former MP Mansour Al-Bon of winning a seat over Aoun’s electoral list. The people behind this opinion even go as far as to say that Aoun’s slight advantage in the Northern Metn was the result of over two thousand Shiite votes in addition to the Tashnaq’s vote’s weighing in favour of Aoun.

3 – A message to Speaker Nabih Berri that even if he is the primary representative of the Shiites, the party is not willing to go along, in its political decision, with Berri in everything. It was for instance the Party's influence that prevented some Shiite parties in the district of Aley from voting – as per Berri’s advice for the sake of his relationship with the progressive socialist party leader Walid Jumblatt – for MP Akram Shehayeb. It was also this same influence that prevented the same thing for MP Ayman Choucair in Baabda. This was even more pronounced when the party did not support Berri’s candidate and personal friend MP Samir Azar in the Jezzine district.

4 – A message to MP Jumblatt that the party will never forgive him his past, despite the openness he has been showing in recent months. This also means that there is no political power for Jumblatt in the district of Baabda without the party’s prior approval.