Lebanon: will the vote of the diaspora benefit the "revolutionary" parties?
Audio 01:23
Lebanese parliamentarians during a vote in September 2020 (Image illustration).
© AFP
Text by: RFI Follow
2 min
In Lebanon, the parliamentary session resumed on Tuesday, October 20.
The date of the legislative elections has been brought forward by a few weeks: they will be held on March 24.
The Lebanese diaspora, which represents several million people around the world, will be allowed to vote for the 128 deputies in the Chamber, against 6 previously.
Advertising
Read more
With our correspondent in Beirut
,
Noé Pignède
It is a modest country house, not far from the port of Beirut.
On the table, there is a coffee machine and some posters of the "Third Voice for Lebanon" party, a party that emerged from the protest movement against the elites of October 17, 2019.
Lina Hamdan is a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies.
She welcomes Parliament's decision to fully open the legislative elections to the Lebanese diaspora. "
We are counting on all these Lebanese youth who have emigrated to find work elsewhere, because they have revolutionary ideas, that is to say - say modern ideas.
They want reforms, they want the recovery of the country, and we are counting on this new blood to revive this Parliament which is really inactive,
”she said.
Request from revolutionary parties
The demand for this vote for the diaspora emanated in particular from the so-called “revolutionary” parties resulting from the social movement of October 17, 2019, when tens of thousands of Lebanese took to the streets to demand the departure of the political class.
Because many potential voters of parties like Third Voice have left the country in recent months, exhausted by the economic and political crisis in Lebanon.
So to campaign, activists rely above all on the Internet.
►Also listen: Lebanon: October 17, the failed revolution
“
Me, if I take the generation of my friends, we were ten childhood friends, I'm the only one in Lebanon.
And them, I know that they follow what is happening in Lebanon through social networks.
So, today, door to door is done for people 'with white hair', but young people, especially the diaspora, are on social networks,
”said Rafic al Helou, in his thirties.
Thanks to a massive mobilization of millions of Lebanese around the world, the movement hopes for a significant breakthrough in Parliament.
To win the maximum number of votes among young people, he is now asking for the lowering of the legal majority from 21 to 18 years old.
Newsletter
Receive all international news directly in your mailbox
I subscribe
Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application
google-play-badge_FR
Lebanon