Several issues...

It seems that I have several issues to talk about. First there is an article by Michael Young (the Opinion editor of the Daily Star -a Lebanese English newspaper- and who usually write poignant article that leans towards March 14^th position) that speaks about the lack of serious and on the ground efforts of Saad Hariri and the Future Movement towards their popular base and how he must come back to Lebanon to spear head the 14 of March movement in these critical months. A very interesting and honest article, in my opinion.

Next there is the whole mess with the Human Rigth Watch organization and their report on Hezbollah's violations and war crimes in July 2006 fighting with Israel. The HRW planned to published the report during a press conference, Hezbollah objected and threatened that they will hold demonstrations in front of the hotel, where the press conference would take place. HRW backed down and launched the report on its website without a press conference. A terrible shame if you ask me.

Here is the link to the report, and the page of the Israeli-Lebanese conflict (if you wanna judge the fairness of the organization) I recommend everyone to read it (at least the summary) and I will post a full analysis of the report soon.

Finally, I still to write my comments on the Annahar study of Lebanon’s population that I talked about in my previous post.

Annahar study of Lebanon's population!

Annahar -one of Lebanon's most trustworthy and unbiased newspapers- published a very interesting study on the sectarian breakdown of Lebanon's population, and the future change it may witness.

The study is in Arabic and Annahr articles are only free for one day, so if you wanna have a look you need to hurry. However i will try to post a summary of the major findings tomorrow.

Sofres Poll on Aoun popularity

While browsing the latest Lebanese news site, called NowLebanon, i found out this opinion poll made in early august (before the by-election) I found it interesting so here is the link and the most important results:

According to a recent Sofres poll, Lebanese Christians have become steadily more critical of opposition leader Michel Aoun since the escalation of Lebanon’s political crisis in January. Nevertheless, Aoun remains the most popular choice for president. Explaining this situation goes a long way to revealing Aoun’s political strengths and weaknesses.

According to the poll’s findings, the ongoing political deadlock has caused Aoun’s reputation to erode significantly among Christians. In a January Sofres poll, 50% of Christians stated that they had a favorable impression of Aoun, while 40% had a negative impression. By May, only 41% of Christians answered that they had a favorable opinion, and 52% had a negative opinion.

In contrast, March 14 leader Samir Geagea saw his favorability rating improve from 43% positive and 45% negative in January, to 54% positive and 40% negative in May.

The decline in Aoun’s reputation has been mirrored by a Christian shift toward March 14 in general. Christian support for March 14 grew from 35% in January to 42% in May, while support for March 8 shrunk slightly during the same time period, from 34% to 31%. 27% of Christians, however, still respond that they support neither March 8 nor March 14, a figure that has been relatively stable throughout the duration of the conflict.

The engine for this growing discontent seems to be Aoun’s alliance with Hezbollah. Many Christians are, and always have been, wary of the armed Shia group. When asked which party represented the greatest threat to them, 25% of Christians, a plurality, named Hezbollah. 55% of Christians favored the unconditional disarmament of Hezbollah in May – an increase from 47% two months prior. Disapproval of Aoun’s Memorandum of Understanding with Hezbollah has also increased recently, from 41% in March to 52% in May.

Aoun’s advisors should be telling him that his presidential chances remain good – but that his alliance with Hezbollah is causing him to slowly bleed Christian support. He is currently benefiting from divided Christian strength among the March 14 forces and the strong support base he built up before 2005. However, these are two rapidly-dissolving advantages: the March 14 coalition will likely soon unite around a presidential candidate, and the longer Aoun remains tied to groups like Hezbollah, the faster many Christians are going to forget about his past accomplishments.

Al Manar’s hypocrisy!

The son of President Lahoud just got married, and the father threw his son an extravagant dinner and ceremony in the presidential palace. The story ends here and frankly I don’t care about Lahoud or his son’s marriage. But what is interesting is how Al Manar (Hezbollah’s TV) dealt with that piece of news. They totally ignored!

Now fast rewind to a couple of months ago, similar event, Prime Minster Siniora held a sumptuous marriage celebration for his son in the Saray (the Prime Minster’s Palace) For several days however AL Manar top news was a detailed coverage of the celebration, that dwelled on the kind of food that was served, the invited personalities and even the color of the napkins…

Al Manar ridiculed PM Siniora, asking how he dared use the Saray for personal use, even though PM Siniora hardly ever goes out of the compound for security reasons. The campaign went for days and days, frankly it was nauseating.

This time around not a word not even an insinuation was uttered on the President and his son’s marriage. That’s my friends is called pure hypocrisy…

A presidential bid and a big surprise

Last week two main events in Lebanon feverish political scene were a General Suleiman (the head of the Lebanese army) almost official candidacy for the most coveted of all political posts: the Presidency!

The General first went a held a long meeting with the Maronite patriarch, to get his blessing, especially that the General’s appointment will require a constitutional amendment.

And then the General went on a media rampage selling his candidacy. And in a typical Lebanese fashion he flip flopped between different positions in order to please all influential factions that governs the outcome of the Presidential election (the US, France, Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and their respective Lebanese representatives)

So the General declared that neither the Lebanese Government nor the Syrian intelligence provided any help or support to Fateh Al ISalm, the terrorist group, fought by the army in the north. Additionally, he furiously vented for the lack of support and help to the Lebanese army, then two days later thanked the United States for the substantial and important help it is providing to the army…

Personally I am against his candidacy. I think one general every decade is more than enough! And after our experience with General Lahoud I will need at least two or three decades before I could even consider a former general as the president of Lebanon.

Finally, in another media stunt that could lead to a war, Mr. Nassrallah claimed that in the event Israel attacked Lebanon he has a “big surprise that could change the war and the fate of the whole regional” what Nassrallah is hinting to is open to many speculations, and one of them is that Hezbollah has weapons of mass destruction in its possession.

But one thing is for sure in International Relations you NEVER EVER threaten or claim to have a weapon of mass destruction. This would immediately provide the international community and Israel with a legitimate and concrete argument to attack Hezbollah. And if Nassrallah’s statement was not intended to give that message, well he should clarify it and fast…

Aoun popularity suffers a 31% drop in the last election!!!!

According to the final detailed results, and my calculation Aoun popularity fell by more than 24.2% in the Metn. And when I say Aoun I mean his own party’s popularity without his allies (Murr, Armenians and the SSNP/Baath…)

I reached this number by taking the final vote tally for Aoun’s candidate 39534 and then I subtracted the Armenian vote 7300 and Murr’s bloc 10400, various Muslims votes (around 1500) and the SSNP (which most analyst place around 2000)

In between I calculated Murr’s bloc to be around 10400 because in 2005 most analyst placed it around 13000 or 14000 and if one looks at the numbers in Murr strongholds (Imart shelhoub, Btegrine and Biskenta) he lost around 15% to 20% of his popularity, so I went with 20%.

The number we get is 18334=39534-(7300+10400+1500+2000) and that is how many voters owe their allegiance to Aoun.

If we apply the same process to the 2005 election this is what we get: Aoun candidate on his list get an average of 53000 votes, out of this 13000 were for Murr, 7500 for the Armenians, 1500 various Muslims and 2500 SSNP. So Aoun voters amount to 28500.

So 28500-18334= 10166 which translates into a whooping 35.6% drop!!! Of course we need to substrate the 4.2% drop in participation (51.2% in 2005 and 47% in 2007) so this lead us to a final number of 31.4%

Finally, I will add that the Tachnak Armenian party said that it participated by around 8400 (ie 1000 vote more than I calculated) unfortunately I cannot verify this number because there is some mixed voting district where Armenians and other sects voters cast their ballot, so it is impossible to calculate exactly their numbers. (in Lebanon most voting centers are divided on sectarian basis) But in any case if that was true than Aoun popularity dropped by an even larger percentage!

Additionally, Aoun apologist blamed this drop on several factors, such as compassion for the assassinated MP Pierre Gemayel whose seat was in play. Abdo Saad, the pro Aounist electoral analyst, in his article said that this factor place a role as 51.7% of Women voted for Amine Gemayel while 51.9 voted for Aoun candidate. Well if that is true than this factor had a minimal affect that does not amount to more than a 3.6% change (if we considered that both sex should have voted the same) so the drop in Aoun popularity is still 27.8, in short no matter the excuse one can find Aoun popularity dropped at least, and I stress at least by 25%, regardless of all the factor Aoun supports blame…

One last point, the whole issue with the Armenians and blaming them for the defeat of the 14 March candidate, was a sorry thing. It should have never happened, even if there was widespread election manipulation or rigging. This is Lebanon and these ways have always happened one cannot blame a whole sect because some Tachnak party official wanted to squeeze a few more votes out of his consistency to better his options. And as I said before, all in all it was a free and relatively transparent election, so congratulation to the winner and long live democracy.

Source: Al-Akhbar and Annahar (unfortunately Annahar archive is paid so it is no longer accessible if you want to check the article it was published on August 9^th 2007, page 13)