The Lebanese Elections Issues [Part 2]

In the US, it is axiomatic that "All politics are local". In Lebanon, local debates only matter in elections once the regional issues are set. In the second entry in the series about the Lebanese electoral issues, The Beirut Spring will start looking more into the bread and butter of politics. How are the traditional left and right manifested in Lebanon?
We start with the social aspect: who are the social liberals and conservatives?

Social progressivism has always been relative to its environment: In Saudi Arabia, the progressives are demanding that women be able to vote, In the US, they want homosexuals to get married, in the Netherlands...well, forget the Netherlands, progressives are out of fashion there anyway.
In Lebanon, if I were to pinpoint the debate that most defines social progressivism, it would be "Civil Law", or "Rule of the Clergy"

What would you call a country where you don't have the basic freedoms of deciding your marriage, divorce, child custody and inheritance? In Lebanon we still call it a democracy.
To those of you who are not familiar with our Lebanese ways, the Lebanese solve their marital and inheritance issues according to their religion, creating a parallel legal system that has God as a judge.

Back in 1998, president Elias el Hrawi thought that it was absurd that If a Lebanese wanted to marry into a different sect, he/she still has to have a civil marriage in neighboring Cyprus. Why don't they get married here if we accept the Cyprus marriage anyway?
A secularist president par excellence, he reasoned like Lea Sawaya did:

Lebanon [...] would benefit tremendously from the application of an optional civil marriage law.
Such an arrangement would encourage mixed marriages and would also seek to institutionalize equality between genders on many levels, including that of marital rights, inheritance, and child custody as compared to most religious marriages that favor fathers.
Civil marriage would legalize adoption, as well, forbidden under Islamic law. It could also pave the way for a possible abolishment of sectarianism in a country that has been severely suffering from this problem ever since it existed.

So he braved his way into suggesting an "optional civil personal status law". He might as well have declared a war: Panicked, clerics from all religions, sensing power slipping from their hands, lobbied together with politicians (including Hariri) and, in an impressive show of force, killed the project before it saw the light.

To Foreign observers, Patriarch Sfeir might seem like a sensible, freedom-loving, democracy-preaching individual. That is true, as long as you don't mess with the "Secrecy" of marriage and the prohibition of divorce. Jumblat is supposedly the leader of a "Progressive" party, but the Druze he represents are notorious for not allowing inter-faith marriages. Even the Harirists, with all the hoopla and media frenzy of unity and common future these days, have the civil law issues very low in their priorities (if it were there at all).

So who are the champions of secularism in Lebanon?
Unfortunately, with some notable exceptions, they are the same people who are on the wrong side of the W.O.W spectrum: the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, the Communist party, the Secular Democratic Party and Najah wakim's People's Party.



Free and fair elections should be a golden opportunity for the progressive forces to advance their cause, Lebanon after all has a majority of under-30 voters, but that will require some patience: the Lebanese democracy needs to mature a bit.

Next, The Economy..