Monday, August 06, 2007

Final Results…

Aoun candidate won by 418 votes! He got 39534 votes while Amine Gemayel got 39116. The Aounist candidate won by 0.5%, compared to 2005 when Aoun top candidate got 68% and an average of 63% for all his list, this is a big surprise!!

First of all it is a victory for democracy and for the government of Lebanon, which proved to be fair, democratic and totally unbiased. The government proved it legitimacy and its neutrality in the election.

As the full detailed results have not been announced yet, i will limit myself to a few remarks: My earlier predications was slightly off (as I awarded Aoun with more votes) but all in all what I predicted “a close battle with a slight advantage to Aoun” materialized!

Additionally, it seems that Aoun lost much more than the 15% I forecasted. The moment I get the detailed results I will make the full calculations. But it seems that Aoun got less 45% of the Maronite votes and his support dropped by at least 20%.

And for all FPM supporters who downplayed the importance of the SSNP and Baath in this election, I can only say that Aoun candidate only won because of the SSNP and Baath parties votes (remember the difference of 418 votes between the two candidates!!!)

In the end, no blood was spilled and that was a miracle, Aoun nearly caused a major riot by asking his supporters to descend to the central counting building, but the quick Army reaction saved us form the worse.

There was no big winners and no big loser. A usless battle that would not solve anything, on the contrary it strengthened the division between the two main Christians parties and thrust the Armenians in the middle of a battle they should have avoided at all cost!

At least we can still claim to be the only country in the arab world that has free elections...

So congratulation to the winner and long live democracy!!!!

8 comments :

poshlemon said...

It was a very interesting day yesterday. What was even more interesting is how all of a sudden the 'Armenian' vote is not accountable for. Aren't the Armenians Lebanese or atleast holders of the Lebanese passport and have been living in Lebanon for generations and generations? Aren't they Christians? So I think they are entitled to vote and their vote is on an equal calibre with that of the other Christians (Maronites, Greek Orthodox, etc...) Speaking of it in other terms would only be considered discrimination.

BOB said...

I totally agree posh...

But did you forget the shiite vote (around 2000) and the SSNP(around 3000) and went to Aoun? So after 2 years of saying that teh FPM MPs were the only ones representing the christians we now have Amine Gemyal who represent the majority of Christians...but Aoun denies him this representation... Go figure...

poshlemon said...

I don't care. I think both are strong in their right. I think Aoun is strong too because he not only has the Maronite vote but also the Christian (including Armenian) and Muslim vote. That's a very striped representation. It can only be good.

BOB said...

Well you could say that Aoun is stronger, he won after all, but what you can no longer say is that Aoun represent 70% of all Christians all over Lebanon. He is one of many leaders of the christians community.

Anonymous said...

Bob, Metn is the stronghold of Gemayel family. So, reaching 50% in Metn is the maximum for him. In any other region, he will not have the same score against an unknown FPM candidate. We cannot conclude after this election that Gemayel = Aoun, it's not accurate at all. You are comparing a Feudal leader and a National leader, that's not the same situation.
If you put Gemayel in Baabda against Aoun, he will be severely beated by Aoun. You know what I mean?
That's why, for me, it's an interesting result for FPM, knowing the circumstances of the vote.

PS: At the end, when you analyses the Muslims votes, you can notice that they were equal for both. But for me, sectarian interpretations is not a way of analyzing results in such a country. We have to stop this killing sectarian reasoning.

Anonymous said...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tqbCaxczTo

BOB said...

First i ll explore the vote and the result in a detailed post now that i got the numbers.

Two, sure when you look at it this way it may seem a good victory for Aoun. But are you forgetting the 20000 difference he got over Pierre Gemayel (who was more popular than his father -ie no blood on his hand, young and full of promise- ) what happened? where did the 20000 go? something happened to Aoun popularity because neither sympathy vote nor all the money in the world can change the mind of 20000 ppl.

so that is the defeat of Aoun losing 20000 voters and let me inform you that i never said Aoun=Gemayel i said that Aoun is now one among many Christian leaders. he is powerful though, but he does not have the fabled 70% of Christian vote...

BOB said...

ah and about the video when i will speak about he numbers in detail i will touch upon the issue of the mujanaseen