By Lynn Bou Daher | Staff Writer
For more than 30 years, we have been hearing the same names being elected. In fact, the Lebanese people were divided into two camps: those who vote for their party every election, and those who simply decide not to vote, either because they live abroad or because they don’t believe their contribution will make a change.
With the upcoming 2022 elections, things are murky. The Lebanese public both dread the elections with fear of history repeating itself, but also ponder a sliver of hope that things may change given how much things have gotten worse under the current rule.
In 2013, the parliament issued a decision to postpone elections due to security reasons. After that, parliament postponed elections twice until they were finally held in May 2018. This highlights how determined state politicians are to stay in government. The state’s legal code of conduct has been altered or set aside three times with the excuse of protecting the security and safety of the country.
The past aside, there is hope yet. In the 2018 elections, only 49.2% of the Lebanese electors voted, meaning the majority abstained from the entire voting process. Now, with the 2022 election nearing, the public has been through an economic collapse, currency inflation, a global pandemic and the port blast of August 2020. If more than half of the Lebanese public had no social efficacy in the state and its voting processes before, the events of the past two years have only increased this distrust. While this is unfortunate for the ordinary modern state, it might actually feed into Lebanon’s salvation. The voting power is in the hands of the public, and it goes unsaid that the majority do not trust the state or its overstaying so-called politicians anymore.
The first date for the 2022 elections was assumed to be during May. However, after several parliamentary meetings, a decision has been taken to move it up to March 27th 2022. Some suspect that one of the reasons for this is to offer less time for the parliament to try to enforce a law that would give a percentage of seats in the parliament to women. The majority of the parliament rejected this statement, however. Initially, it was decided that the Lebanese diaspora would vote for 6 seats instead of 128 which drove out every bit of anger that was still present in the people. At that moment, the power of the people evidently outshone the people in power, and public pressures were able to officially and legally regain the right to vote for 128 seats from abroad. In fact, campaigns all around the world were urging expats to register to vote as they deserve to come back to a better version of their home. Ultimately, the total expat registrants numbered at 244,442 – up signficantly from the almost 83,000 in 2018.
Two years ago marks the start of the Lebanese revolution. On October 17th 2019, Lebanese people from across the world took the streets and stood in unity to fight against corruption. All our efforts since then will be apparent after the 2022 elections. March 27, 2022 is a date that will either mark the start of a new story for this resilient country, or it will be the day we choose our future and leave our home. We have already lost hundreds of talented people from across Lebanon. We have lost our savings, health, and children. What else is there to lose?