Daily Star - House Doomed Prospects For Lower Voting Age

Analysis

BEIRUT: Parliament’s failure on Monday to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 almost certainly dooms the measure for the near future and might also lead to further postponing municipal elections slated for June, a number of analysts told The Daily Star on Wednesday.
Sixty-six of 128 deputies abstained Monday from voting on a proposed constitutional amendment to lower the voting age from 21 to 18; almost all of the legislature’s Christian MPs refrained from voting on the draft due to longstanding concerns over the spiraling demographic predominance of Muslims among the nation’s youth.
In addition, Sunni legislators from the Future Movement of Prime Minister Saad Hariri also abstained. Some Future lawmakers said they wanted to pass the bill only in conjunction with legislation allowing expatriate Lebanese to vote, but the party’s self-interests also largely motivated their silence, said Habib Malik, who teaches history at Lebanese American University and is the son of Charles Malik, one of the founders of modern Lebanon and co-author of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
In looking at the breakdown of potential new voters, Future politicians saw that, despite the overwhelming prevalence of Muslim citizens, their Sunni co-religionists would not gain any advantage over their Shiite rivals from Hizbullah and Amal, Malik added.
“The Sunnis feel that this measure would serve primarily the Shiites,” he said.
Furthermore, the Future Movement knew that the country’s Christians did not support the proposal, so the party catered to their wishes in order to curry Christian voters’ favor for Future’s Christian allies in the March 14 coalition, said former Ambassador Abdullah Bou Habib, managing director of the Issam Fares Center for Lebanon, a nonpartisan think tank. With Christians having become the decisive swing voters in Lebanon, Hariri and his party have embraced an agenda and slogans long dear to Lebanese Christians, such as calls for a free, united and democratic Lebanon, Bou Habib added.
“The Future Movement showed [on Monday] that it is more aware and sensitive to Christian demands,” he said.
On the other hand, Oussama Safa, executive director of the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies, said the Future Movement failed to back the amendment only because it could not reach a deal to secure the support of March 8 politicians for other items in exchange for passing the voting-age bill.
Despite the welter of rhetoric tying the voting age to expatriate voting, Future Movement was more likely fishing for approval of its upcoming budget proposal and other economic reforms related to the Paris III donors conference, Safa said.
“Somewhere, somehow, I smell a deal between the Future Movement and the opposition,” he said. “There was a deal that was not ready yet.”
Monday’s defeat also signals that Parliament will not be able to muster enough votes any time soon for lowering the voting age and installing expatriate voting, Safa said. “Any possible reforms on these two [issues] are gone,” he said. “Any possibility of a deal was shut down on Monday.”
The inability of the March 14 and March 8 factions to hammer out a compromise over lowering the voting age – a reform ratified by Hariri’s national-unity Cabinet – underscores that the government will likely remain too internally divided to enact major political reforms, Safa added. The administration will probably limit its focus to economic issues and state appointments, he said. “Politically earthshaking events are probably postponed,” Safa said.
That means politicians will likely lack the unity and political strength to enact the Cabinet’s decision to reduce the voting age in time for the next general elections, which should be held in 2013, Safa added.
As for the municipal elections planned for this spring, the collapse of the voting-age amendment will “probably” force a delay in the poll, which the Constitution mandates should be held by May, Safa said. The Cabinet last month voted to postpone the poll until June. Except for President Michel Sleiman and Interior Minister Ziyad Baroud, no politician “wants to fight” to meet the constitutional deadline for the municipal elections, Safa added.
In response for the failure of the voting-age amendment, March 8 politicians who had supported the measure appear to be creating obstacles to holding the municipal elections according to the Cabinet’s timetable, Malik said.
“I’m seeing a kind of retaliation,” he said. “They’re saying reform has to precede elections, which is another way of putting off the elections indefinitely.”
Rumors have long circulated that politicians were bargaining over reducing the voting age as quid pro quo for allowing expatriates to vote and granting citizenship to foreigners of Lebanese descent, with the participation of Lebanese abroad seen by many Christians as partly offsetting the overwhelming proportion of Muslims among Lebanon’s youth.
Regardless of whether this Parliament can lower the voting age, growth among the country’s Muslim population continues to outpace that of the Christians, which calls into question Lebanon’s many political dictates requiring a 50-50 distribution of spoils between Muslims and Christians, the analysts said.
Permitting expatriate voting and expanding the voting rolls with those of Lebanese descent would likely only have a “psychological effect” in ameliorating Christians’ trepidation before Lebanon’s ballooning Muslim population, because research predicts expatriate voting would not fundamentally reshape the country’s electoral math, Safa said. Expatriate voting would represent only a “stopgap” measure in the face of the demographic pressures, Malik said.
In this respect, Parliament’s inability on Monday to lower the voting age – a move which many Christian MPs said they support in principle – might augur a future political restructuring of power-sharing mechanisms, Malik added.
“This system has no future short of radically revisiting Taif,” he said, referring to the 1989 Taif Accord which ended the 1975-90 Civil War and organized much of today’s political architecture, including the 50-50 split between Christians and Muslims in Parliament. “It makes no sense to swallow the mendacious proposition of 50-50 – that’s not reality.”
“The question is growth rates and trends; they don’t look good for the Christians down the road.”