Hezbollah’s hopes to legitimacy in Lebanon are dashed.
What the United States should be promoting is not elections, but free elections, and the voting in Lebanon passed any realistic test. Anyone who wanted to run could run. The participation rate was 53 percent, close to our turnout in last year’s presidential race. By all accounts the votes were counted fairly. There are rumors about large amounts of Saudi money floating in to support the victorious March 14 coalition, but so what? Hezbollah gets at least $200 million a year from Iran. It is striking that the losers are not crying foul; they too agree the election was fundamentally fair.
In the east, nothing new.
Iran’s election today presents the voters with no similar opportunity. There is no chance for voters to register their opposition to the theocratic system or tell the ayatollahs to go back to the mosques. The candidates have been carefully screened to exclude anyone opposed to the ruling clerical establishment; each is part of the Islamic Revolution’s old guard.
Nor is it likely that the votes will be fairly counted; indeed most analysts concluded that the 2005 election was manipulated to produce Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidential victory. Vote destruction and ballot stuffing are easy in a hidden process controlled by the Interior Ministry. And if all else fails, the 12-man Guardian Council has the power to throw out the results in districts where there were “problems” — problems like a reformist victory.
Iranian elections sound much like Chicago elections.
There’s another lesson in the outcome of the Lebanese elections that’s not getting much attention: the radical elements in Islam don’t do very well in the long run.
Similar to what happened in Algeria and Turkey, when elections got free the radicals improved their positions in the first round. However, as time passes and the voters start to see what the radicals really stand for, the extremists’ position weakens and cooler heads begin to prevail.
Did ANYONE expect free elections in Iran, with the mullahs firmly in control, and trying to accelerate their nuclear weapon program? Lebanon is a different story, since the elections there have always been about a “balance of power” between all of the rival factions, although it’s very good to see that car bomb assassinations were not part of the campaign this time…