Some people say that there is no democracy in the Middle East.  Lebanon’s 81 officially active and registered political parties and associations, however, suggest otherwise.  But, are these 81 parties a testament to Lebanon’s democratic past and to its current potential, or are they nothing more than a chance for some of Lebanon’s richest men to turn their cash and good family name into their own political fiefdoms?

The Law of Association, regulating the registration of political parties and associations, dates back to 1909, when Lebanon was still a part of the Ottoman Empire.  And, because the law has hardly been updated in the last century, it means that party registration is oftentimes inconsequential.  Hezbollah, for example, one of the biggest players on the Lebanese political scene, is not officially registered with the Ministry of the Interior.

Regardless, with the year 2006 as a witness, when 30 parties registered with the government (compared to the registration of just five parties in 2005), more and more Lebanese seem to be signing onto the idea of a new generation of political parties for a new generation of citizens.

Emile Rahmé, a former Lebanese Forces Central Committee member who felt betrayed by party leader Samir Geagea, and Roger Eddé, a onetime Aoun ally who left the General after his alliance with Hezbollah, spoke to NOW Lebanon about exactly this phenomenon.  It so happens that in breaking old ties and forging new alliances over the last three years, both men have found themselves named chairmen of second-tier parties with no deputies in parliament – Rahmé of the Lebanese Solidarity Party and Eddé of the Lebanese Peace Party. 

The effectiveness of these new parties has yet to be adequately tested, but investigations suggest that they must be considered on a case-by-case basis.  Some have something valuable to add to the debate, but others – like Fouad Makhzoumi’s National Dialogue Party – tend to misuse their party status, supplementing personal ideologies with untoward sums of money to little effect.

Rahmé calls for the return of a two-party system

Frank and to the point, Rahmé said, rather dismissively, “In Lebanon, you just need three people, and you can make a political party.”  He believed that the overabundance of political parties was unhealthy for Lebanon, especially for Lebanon’s much divided Christian community, and even revealed that there were certain conditions under which he would be willing to dissolve his own party.

Rahmé explained that he began to form the Lebanese Solidarity Party in 1985, mostly with former Lebanese University schoolmates from the Awareness Movement.  He did so after years of working with the Lebanese Forces because of a personal and political falling-out with Geagea. 

In the years to come, however, Rahmé never broke one hundred percent with the Lebanese Forces, regularly using the Lebanese Solidarity Party to back LF candidates in elections.  As an attorney, he even headed Geagea’s defense in 1994 when, in a highly controversial and internationally criticized trial, Syrian elements within Lebanon leveled charges against the militia leader. 

It was only after Geagea’s return from an eleven-year prison sentence and Aoun’s return from exile in France in 2005 that Rahmé found himself in total opposition to the Lebanese Forces and firmly in a Christian coalition headed by Aoun’s Free Patriotic Movement and Sleiman Franjieh’s Marada Movement.  To explain this shift, he said that whereas before “Geagea was the Che Guevara of the Christians, now he is the Prince of Maarab.” 

But the alignment of political parties, Rahmé pointed out, is just a partial reflection of the way in which Lebanese politics work.  So much happens outside of the country’s sanctioned political parties.  By Rahmé’s own confession, “The movement of Michel al-Murr, which is not a registered party, is a party in fact, while the Lebanese Solidarity Party is just a party in name.”

“A lot of people do not like to head political parties,” Rahmé continued, “We have houses in Lebanon, and it is better to be the head of a house, a zaim, than to be the head of a political party.”  By way of example, he said, “I am sure that Walid Jumblatt would be happier if you called him zaim than president of the PSP.”  

Rahmé argued that the conflation of feudal power with modern ideas of parliamentarianism perpetuates a distorted form of democracy in Lebanon.  When politics are more about the personality of a leader and less about a political platform, then it follows that the entire political system, by its very nature, will be unstable.  “If Aoun was with Saad Hariri,” he speculated, “you would suddenly find Samir Geagea with Hassan Nasrallah.”

Speaking directly to the sharply divided Christian community, Rahmé posited as an alternative something resembling a two-party system, what he called joint “establishment committees.”  Parties belonging to the Christian opposition, for example, would all disband and then reform as one party.  Seniority, then, would dictate what position former party heads would hold in the new party.  Aoun, for example, would head the party, but then the chain of command would pass through Franjieh, Tashnaq leader Hagop Pakradounian, himself, Waad Party leader Gena Hobeika and then Popular Bloc head Elias Skaff.  The majority would then do something similar, with Geagea at the helm.     
 
Eddé posits new electoral system to include the Shia and negate Hezbollah

Roger Eddé agreed with Rahmé that Lebanon should go back to having just two major parties, but beyond that, his Lebanese Peace Party has a very different take from Rahmé on Lebanon’s cornucopia of political parties and associations.  The fact that there are 81 registered parties and associations, and that nearly a third of them like his own registered in 2006, he said “is good because it was not allowed before.” 

“A parliamentary-democratic system is practically irreplaceable in a country like Lebanon,” he continued, “It means that alliances can coalesce between people who have the same idea of Lebanon.”

Related to Lebanon’s first post-independence president, Bechara al-Khoury, through his mother, and Lebanon’s second president, Emile Eddé, through his father, Roger Eddé has politics running through his veins.  He also happens to be one of the country’s most successful businessmen.

Today, he has his sights set on the presidency, but more importantly, he says, on a new vision for Lebanon.  He, however, is not running with his family’s historic party, the National Bloc, of which he was an active member for 33 years and even onetime secretary-general.  Instead, he is running on the platform of a yet untried party.  The Lebanese Peace Party has no deputies in parliament and has yet to run in any parliamentary election, but Eddé assured NOW Lebanon that in the elections scheduled for 2009, the party will secure at least one seat in each district from Akkar to the Bekaa. 

And with big names like Hussein al-Husseini already signed up, Eddé just might be right.  As a largely pro-government Shia candidate, “Husseini,” Eddé believes, “will gain more seats than Hezbollah in the Bekaa… as he is the only alternative to Nabih Berri.”

Much of the Lebanese Peace Party’s expansive platform rests on reworking the current political system in order to overcome the longstanding “silent debate” between the Shia and the rest of Lebanon.  He believes that a faulty electoral system, in large part, has allowed a “cancer” like Hezbollah to grow in the South. 

“When you rig the system,” Eddé explained, “you force alliances, and those alliances force an exclusive representation for each community.”  “Life is determined by the electoral system,” he continued, “If we had any other [electoral] law, then we would have a different representative of the Shia.”

Eddé says that his is “a party for the 21st century.”  A radical reworking of the system, he posited, and maybe even adding a senate to sit alongside parliament, could wholly reinvent Lebanese politics.  It would, he theorized, allow for more parties like the Lebanese Peace Party to be comprised of members from various confessions, and could conceivably lead to the “de-sectarianization” of the political order.

Hezbollah is the greatest threat facing Lebanon today, Eddé argued, and the only way to combat that threat is to offer the Shia an alternative.  He believes that the Lebanese Peace Party can offer the Shia a much more constructive partnership with the Christians than Aoun’s now-infamous Memorandum of Understanding with Hezbollah.  

Wolf Blitzer and Fouad Makhzoumi, fast friends 

But for the present, smaller parties like the Solidarity Party and the Lebanese Peace Party, despite their grand ideas, ultimately have little say in the goings-on of government; whether or not the 2009 parliamentary elections will change that, only time will tell.  Similar associations, however, do use their party status to good advantage abroad, oftentimes lobbying in the US or Europe in unique and creative ways.  Take, for example, the National Dialogue Party of Lebanon, a one-man show chaired by wealthy Lebanese businessman Fouad Makhzoumi.  

According to reports filed with the US Secretary of the Senate, the National Dialogue Party paid just over $300,000 in 2006 to the top-tier Mississippi-based lobbying firm Barbour, Griffith & Rogers to “provide guidance and counsel with regard to foreign-policy matters before the US Government.”  Furthermore, in 2004 and 2006, Future Pipe Industries, Inc. – a multimillion dollar company chaired by Makhzoumi – paid US Foreign Service Officer Cheryl Steele an undisclosed amount to lobby on its behalf, mostly for industry-related reasons, but also to advance “the Middle East peace process.”

Makhzoumi’s investments rewarded him with multiple summer 2006 appearances on CNN’s “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer.  However, instead of calling for an immediate ceasefire before his nearly one-million-strong audience of American viewers, he used these guest appearances to denounce not only Hezbollah but also Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and his government as weak and ineffective. 

Both Fouad Makhzoumi and Barbour, Griffith & Rogers, however, declined to comment for this article or to add further details.

How many, then, is too many?

In the final analysis, it is difficult to say how many parties are too many for Lebanon.  There is, after all, something commendable in the “rampant democracy” of a nation struggling to define itself after years of Syrian tutelage. 

The Lebanese Solidarity Party, the Lebanese Peace Party and the National Dialogue Party may have no deputies in parliament at the moment, but that does not mean that they have nothing to add to the present debate.  Rahmé has a valid point when he laments the contradictions that issue forth from feudal leaders trying to act like modern politicians, and certainly Eddé’s vision of a dramatically restructured parliamentary system offers decision makers a valuable new alternative. 

Sometimes, though, these parties go too far.  Rahmé at least admits that the Lebanese Solidarity Party is exclusive and is actually more of a “political club,” but Makhzoumi plays a dangerous game when, thanks to ample funds, he speaks to the rest of the globe on behalf of the Lebanese people but with little popular support.  And indeed, while one might take Eddé to task for similar reasons, at least he represents a potential fusion between Lebanon’s historic and moneyed political elite and a modern idea of what non-sectarian parliamentary life might look like in years to come.