In a town that will see “the mother of all battles,” the mood is anything but militant.

Just days before Sunday’s municipal elections in Batroun, the atmosphere was as calm and breezy as the sunny, late-spring day. Near the center of town, in fact, hung a left-over, billboard-sized advert from last year’s parliamentary elections.
 
Bleached white by the sun, the portrait of Gebran Bassil still smiles on passersby from the side of a building. Bassil failed in his bid for parliament then, and, although he’s not even running for the municipal council, he is nonetheless an important figure in the coming election.

Bassil is a Batroun native, and the son-in-law of Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun. He currently works as the Minister of Energy and Water, and his party is this year backing the list of one of his former rivals.

In 2004 Bassil made his second unsuccessful run for Batroun’s municipal council facing a list headed by the town’s current mayor, Marcelino al-Hark, who, at the time, was backed by Batroun’s then-most prominent politician, Said Akl. That political reality, however, is gone.

A few months after Hark and his list won the municipality, his ally Akl took a serious political hit on the national level. Akl, 83, was first elected to parliament in 1968. When the civil war ended, he was close to the Syrians, an ally of Marada Movement leader Sleiman Franjieh and at odds with the Lebanese Forces. He returned to parliament in 1992, 1996 and 2000.

In 2005, however, Franjieh chose Bassil instead of Akl for his list of northern MPs, which lost to a list supported by the then-nascent March 14 coalition. Akl has voted with March 14 since.

This year Akl is the chosen mayor of a list allied with March 14 running against a list headed by the incumbent Hark, itself backed by the FPM. Jurji Rustom, Batroun’s campaign coordinator for the FPM, told NOW Lebanon that the party has been impressed with Hark’s leadership and the good he has done for the town, so they are supporting the man they ran against six years ago.

Georgina Assal, a candidate on Akl’s list, told NOW Lebanon the opposite about Hark’s leadership, and both sides blamed the other for the breakdown of consensus talks. The resulting dynamic is an interesting one, making the outcome difficult to predict.

In last June’s parliamentary elections, the FPM list lost the district but won the town of Batroun by a wide margin – figures from the Ministry of Interior show Bassil and Fayek Younes received 4,229 votes against 1,954 for March 14 candidates Boutros Harb and Antoine Zahra.

That said, municipal elections are often very different than national elections with prominent families holding more sway than political parties. The Akl and Daou families, both locally prominent and historically involved in national politics, are running together against Hark. However, with Bassil and Harb recently trading barbs about who is and who is not interfering in the race, it seems that national tensions and rivalries are creeping in to this local contest.

Both sides predicted a win and rejected the analysis of a local restaurateur, who told NOW Lebanon the city is divided and most voters will pick and choose candidates from both lists instead of voting strictly with one side or the other.