by Mohamad El Sahili | Staff Writer
The Lebanese opposition is already facing a tough time overall, with many of the supposed goals of some of them quickly not materializing as the post-election reality settled in. One of the most prominent opposition organizations, Citizens in a State or MMFD, is currently facing a crisis which may cripple it beyond repair. Last month, the Secretary General, Charbel Nahhas, led a General Assembly vote which allegedly changed the rules of eligibility to run for Secretary General, and reduced the role of the General Assembly of delegates. This has led to mass resignations which raised questions about MMFD’s future.
Over the past year, MMFD has been criticized for its ineffective operation within the context of the Lebanese parliamentary elections, which took place last May and led to notable wins for Lebanese opposition movements. In the runup to the elections, MMFD, who had hinted that they might not run for the parliamentary elections, suddenly decided to nominate sixty five people in all of Lebanon’s fifteen electoral districts. In places like the second district in Beirut, they failed to reach alliances with pre-existing opposition parties, which led them to run in a list of their own. This created a bad impression.
MMFD garnered a little over 1.5% of the popular vote, with astounding losses in many districts,
especially the first Beirut electoral district where Charbel Nahhas ran. The party gained the
majority of these votes through Jad Ghosn, a famous political commentator and journalist who
managed to garner more than eight thousand votes, falling a few hundred votes shy of winning
an electoral seat in the mainly Christian Matn district. In the past month as well, the
Constitutional Council ruled that Ghosn’s contestation of the results was unfounded, thus
dashing any hopes of a political win by a highly popular candidate.
After Nahhas managed to enact the amendments to the party’s bylaws, several high-profile members, among others, resigned from the party for all kinds of reasons. Party member Nour Kilzi, in her resignation letter posted on Twitter, criticized the “blind trust” that members placed in the party leadership has led to a prioritization of loyalty over personal qualities. She also decried the absence of a “transfer of skills” to the younger generation, which has “unfortunately led to the seizure of the movement and prevented it from being a group effort”. These were echoed by many members who resigned or who remained.
Nahhas has consistently faced criticism regarding his political positions. For example, he continues to hold a purposefully vague position regarding the arms of Hezbollah, considered an umbrella for opposing the Lebanese regime. Nahhas’s authoritarian tendencies and casual dismissal of many pressing incidents in the Lebanese mainstream remains reason for criticism. With a renewed grasp on power and a seemingly indefinite tenure as a secretary general, the prospects for MMFD look rather bleak. The structural hierarchy which the party was known for has been admired by some as an example of organization, but now it’s criticized for doing the bidding of Nahhas.
More dangerously, the crisis of MMFD betrays a more dangerous prospect that extends beyond the party itself: are opposition groups so fickle in their construction that they would be unable to stop the emergence of an autocrat, or worse to survive in a climate of political atrophy for them? As regime parties regroup and reorganize to combat the opposition, the opposition itself continues to be mired in paralysis which was only exacerbated by the actions of some “change” MPs and the ever-declining economic status quo, which has forced more people to either leave Lebanon or work hard enough to survive.