The Parliamentary Elections Law in Lebanon.. How does it enshrine sectarian scrutiny and favor the rich?

The countdown has begun for the parliamentary elections in Lebanon scheduled for May 15, 2022, which are conducted according to the proportional law, and 103 lists compete in 15 districts.

The political forces that formulated the electoral law in 2017, find it the best possible to preserve Lebanon's privacy and its sectarian, regional and political balances.

On the other hand, legal experts criticize him, not only because he separates Lebanon into small sectarian units, but also because his architecture was in the interest of the powerful and wealthy.

In order to understand the parliamentary elections through its proportional law and the biography of consensus on it, Al Jazeera Net raises a set of points and questions to explain the law, its political backgrounds and electoral goals, in an exclusive interview with: Former Minister of Interior and Municipalities Ziad Baroud, a lawyer and legal advisor to a number of international organizations, and previously He served as a member of the National Commission for Parliamentary Elections Law between 2005 and 2006, along with Ali Selim, the Executive Director of the Lebanese Association for the Promotion of Electoral Democracy (LADE).

What is the electoral law currently adopted?

With its current electoral law, Lebanon relies on a "proportional voting system".

The law divided Lebanon into 15 major (geographical) electoral districts, which in turn are divided into smaller (districts) districts.

According to the text of the law, each constituency has been allocated a number of parliamentary seats, the least of which is 5 and the maximum of 13 seats, to fill 128 seats in the Lebanese Parliament.

Ali Selim points out that this geographical division of the districts is not based on an understandable scientific base, but rather on a sectarian basis that notes only the sectarian demographic distribution of the Lebanese in the regions.

The elections are represented by the Islamic sects of the Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, and Druze, the Christian sects of the Greek Catholic Maronites and the Greek Orthodox, and the evangelical Armenians, Catholics and Armenians Orthodox.

According to the constitution, every Lebanese citizen who has reached the age of 21 has the right to be a voter, with the exception of a segment of citizens whose participation is prohibited for legal obligations, such as the military or those sentenced to some judicial rulings.

The elections are supervised by a special body called the Election Supervision Commission, which consists of 11 members and exercises its independent role, in direct coordination with the Minister of Interior and Municipalities.

The competent civil society bodies, under the supervision of the commission, have the right to keep pace with the elections and monitor their course, according to certain conditions.

How was the agreement on this electoral law?

And why?

The proportional law to elect members of the House of Representatives was issued on June 17, 2017. Prior to that, Lebanon relied, with its successive elections, on the simple majoritarian electoral system.

Ziad Baroud describes the previous law as very bad.

Although he left the voter the freedom to form his list himself, “but about 75% of the voters, for example in the 2009 elections, which were adopted for the last time the majority system, voted for closed lists, because the dominant political trend was pushing towards dropping the lists with the boxes as they are, and then the parliament consisted of blocks. A traditional party without independent opposition.

The former Minister of Interior recounts the mechanism of consensus on the current law, which has undergone some amendments after its adoption in the 2018 elections.

According to Baroud, the law was agreed upon in 2017, with a Lebanese kitchen closed in Parliament, and its interesting title was “The introduction of proportionality for the first time in the date of the Lebanese parliamentary elections,” but the “demons” lie in its details for many reasons, the most prominent of which are:

Although relativity was a basic requirement, its adoption was not in a good framework, due to the adoption of a high and moving outcome.

The most important problem is the electoral law’s adoption of a single “preferential vote” within a single list, as the voter chooses one candidate within the list for which he voted, giving him his preferential vote, provided that the candidate is exclusively from his smallest constituency.

This vote is "ordinal", meaning if the list gets 3 seats, it is distributed to the first 3 who got the highest preferential vote percentage on the list.

The electoral law does not control the movement of political money, which enhances massive financial spending and affects the freedom of the voter. The law did not provide for the lifting of bank secrecy for candidates, and only allowed the opening of a bank account for the candidate’s electoral campaign, without monitoring his other accounts and those of his family members.

Here, Ali Selim highlights Article 62 of the current election law, describing it as a major problem.

In its first paragraph, it says, meaning "preventing candidates from providing services and assistance in kind and cash to voters during the electoral campaign period, and it is considered illegal", because it is a kind of bribery and vote-buying.

However, the second paragraph of the same article says, “It is not prohibited to submit applications and aid from candidates, institutions, and associations run by candidates or parties who have traditionally presented them in the same size and quantity on a regular basis for at least 3 years from the start of the electoral campaign period.”

This contradiction is justified by Selim by the absence of a legal mechanism to track the candidate or party, if it has actually been providing aid continuously for 3 years, recalling that the duration of the work of the Supervisory Board for the elections is one year, divided between 6 months before the elections and 6 months after them.

"The article gives an indirect privilege to influential candidates who divert aid for electoral bribes," he said.

What is the electoral quotient according to the electoral law?

The electoral quotient is calculated based on the equation of the number of voters in each district, divided by the number of its seats.

For example, if the number of voters in a district reaches 100,000 actual voters, and the district includes 10 seats, the result will be 10,000 votes.

Meaning, that each list in the constituency must get 10,000 votes, in order to qualify for the competition for the seats assigned to it, or else it will be a loser, according to Ziad Baroud.

The former minister adds that the electoral quotient, by international democratic standards, is 5%.

As for Lebanon, it may reach 20%, which is what happened in the 2018 elections, in the Jezzine-Sidon district, while the percentage ranges between 7% and 20% in other districts.

Ali Selim says that the outcome is similar to the threshold that qualifies the list and its candidates to compete for seats, and is achieved through the voters' vote for the lists.

Baroud and Selim agree that the nature of achieving the outcome and preferential votes reinforce selfishness and individualism within the same list, whose members may be busy competing against each other to win the largest number of preferential votes, instead of focusing on the list’s program.

Selim said that the competition for preferential votes among the candidates of the list, gives the influential people a better chance, and turns the role of colleagues with less experience and financial ability to fill the void, because it is difficult for one of the lists to win all its seats.

How does the electoral law enhance sectarian segregation?

Minister Baroud considers that the preferential vote within the composition of districts and seats is what most enhances sectarian segregation, because voters often give their preferential vote to a candidate from their sect, because it is confined to his smallest constituency.

Ali Selim describes the electoral law as sectarian par excellence, because it pushes the candidates to address the people of their major constituency, and they focus on the people of their smaller constituency to reap the largest number of preferential votes, and the discourses often take a sectarian character.

Why was the current electoral law not developed for a better formula?

According to Ziad Baroud, there have been a number of reform projects.

In 2006, the National Commission for Electoral Law had drawn up a draft law that approved several reforms, one of which is the formation of an independent electoral commission to replace the Ministry of the Interior, inserting the women's quota, and adopting the mixed system.

In the sense that a number of parliament seats are elected on the basis of a proportional system with major constituencies, and another section is elected on the basis of the majoritarian system, to give greater balance, and to allow the voter to vote at the same time for a list closed to a proportional system, and vote for other candidates according to the majoritarian system. It was rejected by most political forces, according to Baroud.

One of the reasons for not developing the law, according to Ali Selim, is that it does not objectively pass through parliamentary committees, and private bodies and associations that monitor and monitor elections are not included in the form of the law.

He said that LADE, in its meetings with the administration and justice committees and others, discovered that the committees' role is limited to setting technical procedures for elections, while drafting the law in a deep political sense is limited to a few members of the political forces in Parliament.

Who are the winners of the electoral law?

Ziad Baroud considers that the first winners are the traditional parties that engineered the electoral law.

This was evident in his opinion at the level of its alliances and lists, which seemed more homogeneous than the lists of the opposition forces.

And the winner, in his opinion, is all the candidates and financiers who benefit from the distortions of the Lebanese economy, whether they are from the authority or opponents, after it was transformed by the financial and banking crisis into a cash economy, without relying mainly on bank cards, which plunged Lebanon further into the uncertainty of the electoral political money movement. , And also all those who control the electoral scene through the media or bribery.

Ali Selim says that the electoral law was a deal between the political parties that formulated it, after postponing the elections for two sessions after the 2009 elections, and the major parties agreed on it, led by Hezbollah, the Amal Movement, the Free Patriotic Movement, the Future Movement and the Lebanese Forces Party.

As for the losers, according to Baroud, they are the unorganized opposition groups and those who do not have the financial ability to run and fight the battle.

For his part, Ali Selim finds that the Lebanese, in the medium and long term, are the losers, because the law does not provide dynamism for change, does not give candidates fair opportunities, and legalizes the waste of electoral money under many names, and counts votes in comparison to quotas for sects and parties.