Crazy Beirut

Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde come to my mind when I think of Beirut these days.
Sometimes you enjoy and love Beirut, and sometimes you just want to grind your teeth!
Within a period of 10 days I experienced it all.

I had dinner with family in a very nice restaurant. The restaurant is situated in the interior garden of an old Lebanese house, the weather was perfect, the food quite good, and the service excellent.
Two days later had dinner in a new restaurant based on the idea of mixing fish and meat. Minimalist design and innovative cuisine. Enjoyed the company and the seafood salad of fruits and vegetables with goat cheese. Quite interesting combination.

A day later woke up to an unscheduled electricity cut. Why do I say unscheduled? Because Beirut is a city where due to power shortage there is a scheduled cut of three hours a day in electric supply. It is done according to a timetable and is now considered by all part of regular life.
This cut stayed for more than three hours. I decided to call the phone for customer service at the electricity company. The young man who answered was nice and courteous when he informed me that the reason was a damage to one of the cable and that repairs will be done Monday as maintenance does not work on weekends! Accordingly, almost 72 hours of cut!
Will not comment on what this entails as to no hot water, food spoiling, no refrigeration, no hair dryer, no internet connection, and, and...
Then on Monday around 2:15 pm the current is restored, Yeah! At 3 pm another cut. Again, on the phone, and the nice young man informs me that he does not know why the electricity is cut and advise me to be patient as it is maybe a extra 3 hours cut in the schedule!
Oh yeah, you need to be patient not to blow off!

Then the router for EDSL connection start playing out. So back to the phone trying to talk to Ogero, the company responsible for the service. Nobody answers the phone, then a few hours later, I get through to a gentleman who tells me that I need to change the router and that I need to come personally with the old router and 'maybe' they can give me a new one, not for free and he states the amount.
When asked if I could delegate someone, he answers no, you need to come in person!
So for each services you pay for you need to lose a day without being sure that at the end you will get served!

This all happened in 10 days. But it seems this is regular life in Beirut.

I wonder if I should title the blog crazy Beirut or crazy Lebanese for accepting such a quality of life.

The reality of Lebanon 2018 elections

I started seeing posts saying Hezbollah won the elections.
Looking under the surface the results are not bleak, they are rather good and give hope.

Hezbollah was full blown trying to high-jack the elections. They used the power or intimidation and money to prove they are the strongest player on the popular level.
They first used all electoral strategies such as encouraging from back-doors people against them to present themselves for the elections, increasing the distribution of votes in strongholds of their opponents. They used intimidation by force in their own regions to prevent multiple electoral lists. On the day of the elections they used money to an unprecedented level to buy votes in their strongholds. On the day of the elections they blocked streets to prevent people in Beirut from voting.

The results show a win of 55 to 57 deputies out of 128 for the 14th of March trend which are ideologically against Hezbollah.
The remaining deputies are distributed between Hezbollah, Amal, and the Free Patriotic Movement.

The Aoun group called the Free Patriotic Movement who is allied to Hezbollah but also to Hariri had to use a discourse distancing itself from Hezbollah during the elections to be able to achieve its gains.
The gains in the Shia community are linked to AMAL strength in the South rather than Hezbollah. Though they are allied, AMAL is not a religious party and attracts lots of the non-sectarian Shia population.
Very indicative that Hezbollah lost in its Bekaa stronghold 2 seats.

The people who gained most from this elections are the Lebanese Forces who adopted a non-sectarian discourse that stressed the adherence to a strong national policy including the monopoly of security forces and army as to ownership of weapons. Practically and anti Hezbollah discourse.
The Hariri group called the Future movement lost some of its deputies because, among other reasons, of their undefined 14th of March policies. They were not able to mobilize their base in Beirut and lost votes in the North to more extreme Sunni parties. In addition they gave a lot to the Aoun group but did not gain a lot of votes from them.

In fact the low voter turnout of less than 50% indicates that people were not happy with the electoral discourse and a majority of these people are by heart 14th of March yet disenfranchised by how the 14th of March parties failed to promote their freedom and independence agenda in addition to their failure at addressing issues of concern to the voter such as infrastructure and corruption.

The voting of people for Bahia Hariri and Michel Mour indicates that voters are faithful to people that work hard on their behalf.
The voting of people for Nadime and Sami Gemayel indicates that the real popular mood is not in the absolute against 'political families' as they are called, but rather in line with political strategies and political discourse.

In fact, despite it all the Lebanese voter has showed awareness and that he is much less polarized along sectarian lines than what the politicians believe.