The Energy Ministry's underperformance is especially frustrating given the recent discovery of vast natural gas reserves off the coast. These new resources have not been exploited because March 8 is unwilling to explore a modus vivendi via international mechanisms to establish a maritime border with Israel.
ELECTORAL PROBLEMS
In the lead-up to next year's tentative parliamentary elections, the electoral law has emerged as another source of intractable contention. Both March 8 and March 14 are pressing for legislative changes that would disadvantage the other at the ballot box. The arcane dispute has FPM leader Michel Aoun calling for a shift to a proportional-representation model that he believes will strengthen his coalition and weaken the March 14-leaning swing vote of Druze leader Walid Jumblatt. Meanwhile, Samir Geagea of the March 14 Christian party Lebanese Forces is arguing for changes that would allow his sect to directly elect 50 of the 120-member parliament's 60 Christian seats -- well more than the 35 afforded by the 1960 electoral law and the 27 allowed under the so-called "Ghazi Kanan law" during the Syrian occupation. Given Lebanon's demographics, this change would be unacceptable to both Hizballah and Geagea's own Sunni (and potential Druze) coalition partners.
This issue might eventually have been discussed at the National Dialogue, a cross-sectarian political forum convened by Prime Minister Najib Mikati beginning earlier this year. Yet after March 14-aligned Internal Security Forces official Wissam al-Hassan was assassinated in October, the bloc announced that it would boycott both the forum and the parliament. For the foreseeable future, then, neither the National Dialogue nor the legislature will make any significant progress -- in fact, it remains unclear whether the elections will even take place. Even without the boycott, longstanding acrimony meant that significant modifications were at best unlikely; the electoral-law debate will only add more fuel to the fire.
HIZBALLAH STILL STRONG
Although Hizballah's ongoing support for Assad's brutal repression in Syria has undermined its popularity outside Lebanon, it continues to command impressive support among Shiites at home. When the organization was founded in the early 1980s by Iran, its support was fueled in large part by years of Shiite dispossession, a history of inattention from the state, and a fear of Sunnis, in addition to its anti-Israel message. Today, facing a Sunni takeover in Damascus and sectarian tensions spiking at home, Lebanese Shiites are clinging even more to the powerful militia.
In recent years, a series of embarrassing scandals involving the group and its affiliates have tarnished its reputation, including the distribution of tainted pharmaceuticals by the Hizballah-controlled Ministry of Public Health, reports that the children of senior militia officials have been involved in the production and distribution of narcotics, and a Ponzi scheme perpetrated by the group's chief local financier. Although these missteps are unlikely to threaten its domestic foothold anytime soon, popular support for its Christian ally, the FPM, appears to be eroding amid allegations of corruption in the Energy Ministry and elsewhere.
More troubling to Hizballah is the rather immediate prospect of Assad's fall, which will leave the militia without its chief weapons entrepot and, given its steadfast support for regime atrocities, surrounded by hostile Sunnis. Thus far, the group has responded to mounting pressure by going on the defensive and attempting to avoid escalation at home, but it is difficult to predict how Hizballah will respond to the loss of its key ally in Damascus.
CONCLUSION
Lebanon has a long track record of muddling through periods of severe domestic morass and may do so again if spillover from Syria does not precipitate a further deterioration in security. At minimum, the country's political and economic paralysis will persist until the Assad regime is dislodged next door. More likely, though, Lebanon's stagnation will continue until post-Assad Syria attains a semblance of calm. Next year's elections may change the government in Beirut, but the trajectory of the Syrian war means that Lebanon's tense political status quo and stagnant economy may be the best-case scenario for the coming year.
