Look at how the traditional politicians have stolen our slogans and plans. Look at how they now include women, experts and programs in their campaigns. Look at how they form alliances with the devil out of fear from the independents.

Tomorrow, we will have MPs that truly represent us. How many, is up to how many of you show up and vote. If we look at 2009, what’s happening in 2018 is unbelievable. I am proud of you all, and honored to have protested, gotten beaten up and campaigned alongside all of you. You are what makes Lebanon livable and lovable. Our struggle is a long one, and we have made their octogenarian facade crack and crumble.

Tomorrow, when we wake up, something amazing will happen. Tomorrow, before we sleep, I hope the news will be extra good and surprises will be extra sweet. Next elections, our bloc will be bigger, stronger and have more impact. Till then, we need you to go out and vote tomorrow, especially in districts where good independents are running.

Rejoice. You have run the best campaign this country has ever seen, without spending taxpayer money illegally, or polluting our already toxic environments.

I am proud of you all, and love you all deeply ❤

(Originally appeared as a status on my Facebook profile on the eve of the first parliamentary elections in 9 years)

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Last Minute Recommendations

If your home district has a Kollouna Watani list, vote for them. Even if the coalition is far from ideal, and some of the groups that form it are not your favorites, they are the first time a broad segment of Lebanese citizens has agreed on the broad strokes, gone a step ahead and put citizens and their rights about sectarian scaremongering and perpetuating the corruption machine.

To partisans, no one wants you to abandon part of who you are. If you identify as a Lebanese Forces supporter, or a Hezbollah supporter, a Aounist, or a Kataeb, an Amal supporter or a Kharzeh Zar2a fan, keep doing that. However, pause for a moment and think about yourself. Keep supporting them publicly, play the sectarian games in public. Tomorrow though, behind the divider, tick the box of independents, so that you can try someone new who hasn’t been ruined by the corruption curse. Try so that maybe some aspects of our lives in Lebanon become better in the next 4 years.

Take an hour out of your Sundays, and go out and vote. Please. Let’s keep this struggle going, so that 2022 looks even brighter than 2018. Do it so that in 2026, the parliament is no longer something that’s there to increase MP salaries and hike citizen taxes, but somewhere where progress is initiated, and the country we want starts to form with progressive, pragmatic legislation that we so desperately need, and of course, accountability.

Thank you for voting. Goodnight and see you at the polling stations tomorrow!

It’s time to have a grown-up conversation guys and gals.

Let’s start with the obvious: these elections, under this law, are absolute shit. The law that we previously felt like a dimwit’s clusterfuck, turned out to be an insanely sly orchestrated move by the ruling elite to ensure their asses stay glued to parliamentary seats, in a weird twist that makes proportionality useless in a majority law kind of way, divided and gerrymandered according to sectarian pieces of the pie.

Having said that, we also have 66 candidates that identify as independents in total, and have a stated goal of unseating the current political class. That’s more than any of the political parties. It’s also more than the weird, contradictory and shamelessly shifting alliances between those parties.

So, it’s not all bad, but it’s definitely very, very far from ideal.

Forget Lists

Many of us, myself included, have been preoccupied with the lists formation for weeks. “I don’t want this guy, I want this girl instead. Why is that group on that list. I wish we can pick and choose from lists”, etc.

If you take a step back though, and see things from a wider perspective, you’ll realize this election is basically a 2-step, 1-person-1-vote kinda thing. The law forces you to form lists, which means that sometimes, unholy alliances might spring up. That’s just for the first phase though, where competing lists try to get more than the threshold of votes in a district.

The threshold (7asel), is the total amount of voters who actually went out and voted, divided by the total number of seats in that district. So, if a district has 4 seats, and 40,000 people voted, the threshold for one seat is 10,000 votes.

Let’s consider that the list you support, got 20,000 out of the 40,000 votes. This means they automatically get 2 seats in parliament.

Focus on the Tafdeeleh (Preferential Vote)

Here’s where things get interesting, and where we might be able to salvage our hopes and dreams for real change this election. The 2 seats that are awarded, go to the list that got them, obviously. However, the candidates from the list, who will go on to serve a 4-year term in parliament, are chosen based on which two candidates have the majority of the preferential vote.

So, if the list you love has 4 people, but one you don’t support for whatever reason, such as past involvement with established political parties, behavior or attitudes you don’t support, and anything else that might make you want to not vote for them, you can make your protest voice heard by giving your preferential vote to someone you do support and want to see in parliament representing you from that same list.

This will help ensure that the woman or man you want in parliament, gets a fighting chance to get one of the seats the list they’re part of is able to attain.

Go Vote, and Forget “War2a Bayda”

The more people go and vote, the higher the threshold becomes. Given that, unfortunately, a majority of people who do actually go and vote are partisan, this means that your blank vote is raising the threshold for victory, but also giving political parties an advantage.

Political parties might want less and less people to vote, to keep the threshold down, and maximize their winnings. A blank vote doesn’t do that though, it just makes it tougher for independent coalitions to get to the threshold, given you added to the total number of votes, but didn’t choose the independent coalition and give them a chance to compete with the established political parties in 9 out of the 15 voting districts in Lebanon.

So, if you want your vote to be a protest vote, choose the independent coalition list in your district, even if it’s far from what your ideal list would be, and award your preferential vote to the candidate you feel would be your best representative in the country’s legislative body (protesting the compromises made in some of those coalitions clearly, instead of just ambiguous blank ballots that will do more harm than good). A blank vote just makes it harder to beat the political parties, without giving independents the chance at a fair-ish fight.

Don’t Stay At Home

Not voting is the worst thing you can do under this law, even worse than a blank ballot. Political parties are mobilizing every last one of their supporters, bribing people, spending millions and millions on their campaigns. Their supporters are gonna go vote, whether it’s by actual conviction somehow, intimidation or “encouragement”. The majority of voters, who do not support any of the political parties that have been abusing power and refusing to leave office for almost a decade, need to go vote.

A boycott will not help, as this statement won’t really shake the politicians we have. The kind of people who aren’t ashamed of the corruption, nepotism and criminal waste and theft of public money, won’t be shaken by a low turnout because of boycotting. They’re like alligators, emotionless and with thick skin.

However, if you boys and girls just put the slight effort of showing up to the ballots, choosing the list opposing the current status quo, and making sure you award your preferential vote to a candidate you personally support, we can ensure that the good people from those not-so-good lists get higher chances of being our representatives in parliament.

Endorsements

I will begin publishing my official endorsements of lists and candidates on Monday, April 2nd, 2018. Till then, Happy Easter!

You might have noticed that I have been silent on the independents election campaigns springing up all over Lebanon the past few weeks. The independent, secular campaigns trying to coalesce into something that hopefully isn’t an amorphous blob of compromise and disappointment. That’s because I am still hoping that with the start of March 2018, these campaigns will realize that they need to energize their base, before trying to appeal to voters who would otherwise not vote for them under normal circumstances.

The “Too Risky” Excuse

With potential “independent” lists including so many prominent not-so-long-ago politically affiliated individuals, you might dismiss that as just how elections work, where you tone down the idealism and think pragmatically. Compromise after compromise, I’m worried we’ll end up with something ambiguous, and a far cry from what catalyzed the popular uprising in 2015 and the following impressive results in the municipal elections of 2016.

Too risky to be openly for gender equality, too risky to support LGBT rights, too risky to reassert the constitutionally guaranteed right of believing whatever you want, or not believing at all, too risky to raise issues such as the crisis of hashish arrests plaguing more than 3500 young people a year, too risky, too risky…

With these many asterisks, what exactly differentiates us from the ruling political class? The tired, cliche, over-used, bland slogans and tip-toeing around issues that might be controversial, is what the political parties do, and I don’t know about you, but I will not be committed and excited to work and volunteer and vote for groups that simply say “we’re not them”, while including prominent figures of the “them” in their own lists to be “pragmatic” and toning down the demands that made movements we support popular with voters in the first place.

Demands such as having a secular system, real gender equality, wasta-proof transparency and tackling issues that the political parties consider taboo such as civil marriage, the right for Lebanese women to pass their citizenship to spouses and children and reform of the judiciary and police infrastructure in Lebanon that many unwitting and helpless taxpayers fall victim to every day so a public employee can make a quick buck from bribes.

Focus on the Base First

If campaigns feel the need to include people with them for the sole reason that their original political parties didn’t nominate them, then so be it, but not as part of the independents’ campaign. Form coalition lists with the people that only days ago were members in one of the political parties that have been gripping to power illegally for the past 9 years, but don’t expect us to just accept that they are now one of us, when nothing they have done or achieved proves otherwise: they’re just opportunistic wannabe politicians riding on the wave of support independents have garnered in the face of the astounding failures of the political parties in Lebanon, especially in the last decade.

I did not support and volunteer with movements and organizations because I wanted to maybe win a seat or two here and there. I worked for them because they represented a platform I cared about and could relate to.

A Lebanon where the rotten cheese isn’t split based on whether you worship your deity on a Friday or a Sunday. A Lebanon where old men in black robes don’t decide what’s best for me and my future spouse based on archaic, misogynistic religious laws that take years and a ton of money wasted when a civil court can do a much better, fairer and quicker job at it. A Lebanon where young people aren’t terrified when they see a cop car, but reassured that they are safe. A Lebanon where big corporations don’t wiggle out of their billions of dollar embezzlement lawsuits, while a university kid gets hounded in the justice system for years for a mere tweet.

Before aiming to win new supporters, you need to reassure your base that you’re not just another all-talk, all-compromise bunch of amateurs. We are coming from a place of power, not of weakness. The Lebanese public shares our sentiment, at least the broad lines of it. So why the fuck tone it down? Why would a voter or volunteer choose a group doing the same things as the political parties, just with less money for their campaigns?

Be more aggressive in the demands of voters, especially the younger ones who have never voted and will be the asset that wins us seats across the country.

We Can Be the Largest Bloc

If we get 1 seat in each district, that’s a 15-member parliamentary bloc, which will be the largest, or second largest in Lebanon. This is what we should be working towards. If we get 20 members, then we can flip the tables on this rotten system and begin actually making people’s lives better, not just under-the-table deals for incinerators and power ships to engorge our pockets and party leaders pockets with the people’s money.

Grow a spine and be more assertive on the issues that have allowed you to seek election for public office and be our representatives. Do something different, do something the politicians have never done. Don’t let petty elections politics and unreliable stats and polls of a population that has drastically changed over the last 9 years, make your decisions for you. Take a chance, let people believe in your message.

Stop accepting political partisans in your midst, and instead, figure out how to form loosely-linked coalitions with some of them if need be to ensure we get better chances, but don’t let them fester and crumble what we have worked so long to get to: a Lebanon that looks like us, not the 80-something-year-old gang of warlords and thieves we’ve had to suffer under all our lives.