The results of Lebanon's elections on Sunday have effectively placed the country's institutions in the hands of Iran and its local proxy Hezbollah, a leading Middle East analyst warned during an interview with The Algemeiner on Monday.
"When Hezbollah wins, it means that Iran has won in Lebanon," observed Hanin Ghaddar -- a prominent Lebanese journalist who is now a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy think tank - as results showed Prime Minister Sa'ad Hariri's pro-western Future Movement losing up to one-third of its parliamentary seats.
In a nationally-televised address on Monday, Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, hailed what he called a "great moral and political victory for the resistance that protects the country."
But Ghaddar said that election observers had reported at least 7,000 violations during the poll. In one case, Joumana Haddad, a Christian journalist and women's rights activist who stood as a parliamentary candidate in Beirut, alleged outright electoral fraud when an earlier decision to recognize her victory in the capital's District 1 was hurriedly rescinded.
Ghaddar -- a former managing editor of the independent news outlet NOW Lebanon, as well as a correspondent for leading newspapers including An-Nahar and Al-Hayat -- presented a bleak portrait of Lebanon's immediate future following the dramatic gains by Hezbollah-allied candidates in the 128-seat parliament.
Ghaddar noted that while Hezbollah had been the dominant force in previous Lebanese governments, there was one key difference with Sunday's poll. "In the past, Hezbollah had to make military threats" to ensure that its will was carried out, she said. "Today, they have the state institutions."
The results had graphically demonstrated the widespread skepticism in Lebanon regarding the effectiveness of electoral contests, Ghaddar noted, during a decade that has witnessed the influx of more than one million refugees from the war in Syria alongside economic stagnation. "People do not believe that voting and elections are tools for change," she said. READ MORE
