Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri is on the verge of winning his bet.
Like Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) leader Gebran Bassil and Hezbollah, he did not want the diaspora to take part in the upcoming elections. He knew their vote would be largely unfavorable to him and to his allies.
For months, he did everything possible to limit the vote to six MPs in order to reduce its impact, before arguing that Lebanese abroad who wished to vote “only need to come to Lebanon” to do so.
The result is clear: Two days before the registration deadline, only 87,000 Lebanese signed up to vote from their place of residence, compared with 244,000 in the previous 2022 election.
In other words, the diaspora vote, once brandished like a red flag capable of blowing up the legislative elections, no longer represents such a threat.
Unless there is a sudden shift — a surge of last-minute registrations or a deadline extension, as allowed by the law sent today to Parliament for discussion — even Berri will have no problem with the diaspora voting for all 128 MPs from abroad.
Those parties who have the means will fly in their supporters by the thousands, even tens of thousands, for the occasion.
The others, the independents who are not backed financially by a foreign power, will once again watch the train pass them by.
In 2022, roughly half of registered voters in the diaspora cast their ballots, accounting for 10 percent of all votes, a significant share that had a major impact on the election of the 13 change MPs.
Four years later, the diaspora vote is likely to represent less than 5 percent of voters.
It is to avoid this catastrophic scenario that L’Orient-Le Jour, the Lebanese diaspora’s newspaper par excellence, calls on you to register in large numbers.
All it takes is one click on the following link: https://diasporavote.mfa.gov.lb.
Why do it? Because Lebanon will not change without you. Because if nothing is done, it will continue to fall apart, and everything that still ties you to it, even the smallest things, will eventually disappear.
Because for decades we have heard that we do not control our own destiny, that everything is decided from the outside or that voting is pointless since it will have no impact, and one need only look at the state of Lebanon today to see that this logic is the worst of all. The more we abandon Lebanon to its so-called destiny, the less of Lebanon will remain.
Yes, there is every reason to feel fatalistic when one knows this country closely, its internal and geopolitical realities and its many dysfunctions. Yes, no single election, whatever the results, will be enough to heal all its wounds.
Yes, some consider the entire political class rotten to the core, and that sentiment is understandable, but some are unfortunately even more rotten than others. And without engagement from the Lebanese diaspora, it will be even harder to see new figures emerge.
The elections are, in fact, the only real lever we have to begin even the first steps of change. Lebanon remains, despite everything, a parliamentary system, and this Parliament is supposed to reflect the choices of most Lebanese and the balance of power among political parties.
It may seem absurd to speak of any of this after a war that never truly ended and could escalate at any moment. Yet it is precisely to prevent such scenarios from repeating, and to ensure that those who brought us to this point are held accountable at the polls, that voting is essential.
The elections might not take place, whether because a new war breaks out or because most parties want them postponed for their own reasons. But the worst scenario is an election that produces the same status quo with only marginal changes, which is, for now, the most likely outcome. That would deepen the current deadlock on both the question of Hezbollah’s disarmament and the implementation of reforms.
The main stakes are already known. Will the Lebanese Forces (LF) consolidate their position as the largest party in Parliament and push the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) into a secondary role? Will MPs from the protest movement be swept aside now that the momentum has turned against them? Will opponents of Hezbollah manage to break into the Shiite bloc by winning even a single seat out of the 27 allocated to the community? Will Saudi Arabia succeed in gathering under its umbrella a fragmented Sunni front that has struggled to regroup since former Prime Minister Saad Hariri withdrew from political life?
All of this matters, but it is not what matters most to us.
If Lebanon is truly to change, only one question seems paramount: How many figures who are both sovereignist and reformist, and who embody a national project that rises above communal affiliations, will sit in the new Parliament?
The fewer such figures there are, and the less they are spread across communities, the easier it will be to say almost definitively that these elections have changed nothing.
This article was translated from L'Orient-Le Jour by Sahar Ghoussoub.
