In Tripoli, the disarray of the Lebanese Sunni electorate

In the port city of Tripoli, the Sunni metropolis of northern Lebanon, people lend themselves without enthusiasm to the game of electoral predictions. The campaign for the legislative elections on May 15, already turned upside down by the withdrawal of the leader of the Sunni community Saad Hariri, was put on hold in the face of the anger of Tripolitans after the sinking of a boat of migrants which left seven dead and about thirty disappeared, on April 23.

In the clashes that followed, electoral posters were torn down, others withdrawn by the candidates so as not to heat up the spirits further. Symptom of the misery and insecurity that plague the city, and this even more severely with the economic collapse of Lebanon in recent years, the tragedy casts a shadow on the ballot, the first since the popular uprising of 2019 which demanded the departure of political leaders deemed to be corrupt.

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Both traditional figures and newcomers promise, often without any real supporting programme, the ” change “ to convince disappointed voters and abstainers. The task is difficult in a constituency where only 38% of the 350,000 registered voters went to the polls in 2018. Patronage networks and vote touts were mobilized. “The human being, here, does not have his dignity. Our opinion counts for little. There are always the same faces, the same broken promises. None of them have mercy in the face of the drama we are experiencing. People say they won’t vote, but they will if they are offered money because they need to eat”laments Mahmoud Al-Karakeh, a 68-year-old mechanic.

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“Sunnis are torn and confused. They want the rules of the game to change, not just the player, but that’s not what we’re offering them.”, summarizes the political analyst Khaldoun Al-Sharif. The announcement, at the end of January, by Saad Hariri, that he was retiring from political life, and the order given to his party, the Current of the Future, to boycott the election, reshuffled the cards. Following his father, Rafic, assassinated in 2005, the Sunni leader exercised an almost hegemonic power over his community: his party had still won 21 Sunni seats in 2018, including five in Tripoli. The Sunni electorate – called upon to elect 32 of the 128 deputies according to the confessional distribution of seats in the Assembly, including eight in Tripoli – is now the object of greed between the two blocs which clash at the national level, led respectively by the Shiite movement Hezbollah and the Lebanese Forces (FL, Christian right).

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