By
Van Meguerditchian
BEIRUT:
With no agreement on the horizon about a new electoral law and parliamentary
elections a year away, many Lebanese are eyeing the electoral achievements made
by Tunisia and Egypt following the Arab Spring.
Items
of electoral reform that activists have promoted for years have now been
adopted in Tunisia and Egypt, after popular pro-democracy demonstrations led to
the collapse of regimes that had ruled for decades.
But
Lebanon is far from reaching agreement on its own electoral change, according
to Adnan Melki, secretary-general of the Lebanese Association for Democratic
Reform.
“Developments
in the Arab world put Lebanon and its electoral law under close scrutiny,”
Melki told The Daily Star Thursday.
In
2008, Parliament passed a law allowing millions of Lebanese living abroad to
vote in elections. But a mechanism adopted by PM Najib Mikati’s Cabinet and put
in place by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has failed to gain support among
expatriates.
Of
the at least 10 million Lebanese living abroad, by April less than 5,000 had
registered their names to vote at foreign embassies, according to Foreign
Affairs Minister Adnan Mansour.
In
contrast, Egypt’s administrative court ordered the government to adopt a
mechanism that would allow Egyptian expatriates to participate in parliamentary
and presidential elections, said Ahmad al-Hassan Zard, an official at the
Egyptian Embassy in Beirut.
Speaking
at UNESCO Palace Thursday during an event entitled the National Day for
Electoral Reform, Zard said that “the revolution of Jan. 25 quickly turned a
dream into a reality.”
Zard
said that at least 200,000 Egyptian expatriates voted in parliamentary
elections after registering on the website of the country’s Higher Judicial
Election Commission.
“After
filling in their personal information and national ID number [online], each
person was given a special registration code that identified them with their
respective embassies.”
Some
10 months after the popular uprising that ousted former Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak, parliamentary elections were held in three phases between
November 2011 and January 2012.
Zard
added that registered voters printed their ballots, enclosed them in an
envelope and delivered them to their embassies.
According
to Zard, half of the Egyptians known to be in Lebanon participated in the
country’s first post-Mubarak presidential elections.
Egypt
abolished a Mubarak-era woman’s quota ahead of its parliamentary elections; in
contrast, Tunisia’s High Independent Electoral Commission required half the
candidates on all electoral lists to be women.
“Unfortunately
though, only 59 out of 217 of the elected of the parliament were women,” said
Al-Asaad al-Mahyirsi, a representative of the Tunisian Embassy in Beirut.
He
also said that the establishment of the High Independent Electoral Commission
in Tunisia was crucial to ensuring that last October’s elections were
democratic and transparent.
“Many
of the reforms ahead of our elections were made possible because all [political
parties] were able to reach agreement on them,” Mahyirsi added.
Though
largescale calls for electoral reform in Lebanon preceded those in Egypt and
Tunisia, in the past few years change has been hampered by instability and
political bickering between rival political coalitions.
One
group working for electoral change is the Civil Campaign for Electoral Reform
founded in 2006.
The
CCER calls for proportional representation instead of the current
winner-take-all system. It also calls for 33 percent of electoral lists to be
women, lowering the voting age to 18 and for the establishment of an
Independent Electoral Commission to oversee polls.
Despite
the myriad of electoral proposals that have been suggested as alternatives to
the current electoral system, which closely resembles one instituted in 1960, a
senior CCER official told The Daily Star that no major reforms are likely to be
passed before 2013.
For
the 2009 parliamentary elections, the country stuck with a 49-year-old law,
said Melki.
“The month of June is a
crucial month for this Cabinet, it must fulfill what it pledged in its
ministerial policy statement and issue a new electoral law at least one year
before the 2013 elections,” Melki said.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Politics/2012/Jun-08/176115-lebanon-behind-arab-spring-states-on-electoral-reform.ashx#axzz1xGwpzapL
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