Elias Muhanna, a PhD candidate in Near Eastern Studies at Harvard University, writes the widely read Lebanese blog Qifa Nabki. His commentary has appeared in The National, Foreign Policy, and other publications.

When Lebanon's ruling March 14 coalition won a parliamentary majority in the June elections, pundits rushed to interpret the victory as a sign of widespread popular support for America's allies. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman proclaimed that "a solid majority of all Lebanese . . . voted for the March 14 coalition."[1] Elliott Abrams wrote an op-ed proclaiming that "the majority of Lebanese have rejected Hezbollah's claim that it is not a terrorist group."[2] The victory of March 14 "no doubt came as a huge relief to . . . a good majority of Lebanese," mused Claude Salhani.[3]

As would become clear in the ensuing days, these characterizations were premature. Though March 14 managed to hold on to its majority in the 128-seat parliament, the opposition - comprising Hezbollah, Amal, and Michel Aoun's Change & Reform Bloc - won far more votes. Due to the nature of the Lebanese block vote electoral system (featuring multi-member districts with multiple vote ballots)[4] the exact margin of the opposition's popular vote victory is a matter of dispute,[5] but most calculations place it in the neighborhood of 10%.[6]

Although opposition leaders accepted the results of the election, they have repeatedly highlighted the distinction between the "parliamentary majority" won by March 14 and the "popular majority" won by the opposition.[7] Before examining the political dimensions of this discrepancy, it is worth analyzing how exactly the opposition managed to win the popular vote by such a large margin without winning the election.

According to pollster Kamal Feghali, 53.4% of the popular vote went to the opposition, while 43.4% went to March 14.[8] In a report released shortly after the election, Feghali tabulated the number of votes received by the loyalists and the opposition in each district, along with the winning percentages and the margins of victory.[9] While each coalition won exactly thirteen districts, the average winning percentage in opposition-won districts was much higher than those of loyalist-won districts. In particular, the Hezbollah-Amal bloc gained an average of 88% of the vote in predominantly Shiite districts of south Lebanon and the Beqaa, while the average winning percentage in March 14-won districts was 61%. Under Lebanon's winner-take-all electoral system, higher margins of victory do not amount to additional electoral gains - winning a district by a single vote is just as good as winning it by 100,000 votes. Had the opposition won its districts by margins of victory comparable to those of March 14, the difference in the popular vote would be practically negligible.

It is worth noting that voter turnout in non-competitive Hezbollah-Amal districts (like Baalbek, Zahrani, Nabatieh, Marjeyoun, Sour, and Bint Jbeil) was more or less equivalent to turnout in non-competitive March 14 districts (like Akkar, Miniyeh-Dinniyeh, Tripoli, Chouf, Aley, and Beirut III), hovering around 50%.[10] Moreover, the number of registered voters in the two sets of districts was comparable. All things being equal, therefore, the discrepancy in the popular vote results can only be the result of the high margins of victory enjoyed by Hezbollah-Amal candidates.

This analysis prompts the question of why the winning percentages in Hezbollah and Amal districts were so high. The answer is debatable, but a combination of several factors seem to have been at work. An extensive patronage network dispensing social services, coupled with charismatic leaders and deep feelings of antipathy towards Israel and America, have assured Hezbollah and Amal an enormous following among Shiite voters. The campaign season witnessed frequent reports of intimidation against independent Shiite candidates,[11] which may have contributed to the poor performance of parties like Ahmad al-As'ad's Lebanese Option Gathering. Moreover, March 14 did not bother to mount a challenge to Hezbollah and Amal in predominantly Shiite districts. With no viable alternatives to the Hezbollah and Amal duopoly emerging among these independents or from March 14, a landslide was all but inevitable.

Another issue that pertains to the question of the popular vote is the percentage of Christians who voted for the opposition, versus those who voted for the majority. In 2005, Aoun returned from exile and shocked the political establishment by winning around two-thirds of the Christian vote (a fact that became a staple of his rhetoric). Four tumultuous years later, analysts have turned to these elections to determine where he stands today.

On top of the above mentioned difficulties calculating precise overall popular vote totals, measuring the breakdown within the Christian community (or any other confession) is something of a methodological puzzle, as ballots do not record the sectarian identity of the voter. Pollsters and analysts work out which votes came from which sect through an indirect (and somewhat inexact) method.

Lebanon's polling stations are largely segregated by sect. People typically vote in communal centers close to where they live - schools, municipal buildings, and the reception areas of churches and mosques - and this is how it has remained, even as people have moved away from their ancestral villages. As a result, members of the same sect end up on the same registration lists in the same polling stations, and new voters are added to the lists where their parents or extended relatives are registered. When the Ministry of the Interior publishes the voting data according to polling station, it is a simple step to re-sort it according to confession, and then to determine the breakdowns for each coalition.[12]

Feghali's report states that Christian support for Aoun's Change and Reform fell to 53% in 2009, while a report commissioned by the pro-March 14 daily Al-Nahar put the figure at 49%.[13] Due to the greater fragmentation of Christian support within March 14, Aoun remains the single most popular Christian leader, but these figures suggest that he no longer commands the support that he once did.

Conclusion

A political party or coalition winning a legislative majority despite failing to achieve a majority of the popular vote is hardly a phenomenon unique to Lebanon. In 2002, Turkey's Justice and Development Party won two thirds of the seats in parliament with only one third of the popular vote. In 2005, Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a large majority of seats with only 38% of the popular vote.[14] In almost anything other than a single-district, proportional representation system with a very low threshold, a minority of the popular vote can quite easily translate into a parliamentary majority.

What is rather unusual about (if not entirely unique to) Lebanon's 2009 polls is that a political coalition won a legislative majority in spite of an opposing coalition handily winning the popular vote (in Turkey and Japan, the legislative victor had the largest popular vote total of any one coalition). However, it bears mentioning that the electoral system responsible for this inequitable seat allocation was accepted by all major political parties before the vote. It might just as well have been the opposition that benefited from this deficiency.

What does the loss of the popular vote mean for March 14? Under the constitution, it is perfectly entitled to push through the cabinet of its choice (so long as it has the required confessional balance). However, Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri appears deeply reluctant to pursue a path of executive unilateralism, going to great lengths to bring the opposition into a national unity government. This may have more to do with political realities on the ground than with the electoral results, but he is no doubt cognizant of the experience of the past four years, when the same argument about political vs. popular majorities became an opposition rallying cry.

Notes

  [1] Thomas Friedman, "Ballots Over Bullets," The New York Times, 10 June 2009.
  [2] Elliott Abrams, "Lebanon's Triumph, Iran's Travesty," The New York Times, 12 June 2009.
  [3] Claude Salhani, "Analysis: Pro-West victory in Lebanon," United Press International, 8 June 2009.
  [4] On the block vote system, see http://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es/esd/esd01/esd01b/onePage.
  [5] Despite the best efforts of political parties to persuade voters to vote for their entire list of candidates, voters are technically allowed to vote for altered lists, swapping some candidates for others. That some people do indeed vote for modified lists can be seen from the Ministry of Interior's published electoral returns, which show that candidates running on the same electoral lists often receive different numbers of votes, although the differences are usually small. Determining the total number of votes received by a coalition in a given district is typically performed by averaging the number of votes received by all coalition-sponsored candidates in that district.
  [6] "A win for the West; Lebanon's election," The Economist, 13 June 2009.
  [7] Nasrallah, on Al-Manar TV (Beirut), 8 June 2009. "Arslan: We Have a Parliamentary Majority and a Popular Majority," Naharnet (Beirut), 13 July 2009.
  [8] Kamal Feghali, Analysis of the parliamentary general elections in Lebanon, 2009 (in Arabic), p. 12.
  [9] Feghali, p. 12.
  [10] Lebanon's 7 June Elections: The Results, International Foundation for Electoral Systems, 9 June 2009.
  [11] See Breaking with Hezbollah, Shia politicians chart an independent course, Nowlebanon.com 6 April 2009.
  [12] If the next election law mandates the reshuffling of ballots gathered from all the polling stations before they are counted (as Interior Minister Ziad Baroud has demanded), then it will be impossible to link voting data to sects.
  [13] Hiyam Kossayfi, "A detailed study of voter trends and voting according to sect" (in Arabic), Al-Nahar, 27 June 2009.
  [14] Snapshot: Japan, Fairvote.org, September 2005.