All in the family

So, Michel Aoun’s campaign to improve Lebanon can now be distilled down to one overriding concern: the appointment of his son-in-law, Gebran Bassil, as minister. Aoun insists that Bassil will be named, even though this contradicts an agreement reached between prime minister-designate Saad Hariri and President Michel Sleiman to bar from the cabinet candidates who failed to win a parliamentary seat.

The disagreement has been poorly framed. To lose an election should not prevent someone from becoming a minister, particularly in Lebanon. Nor does the constitution say anything about this matter. How does one win a seat in Lebanon’s parliament? Generally, by riding the coattails of a powerful politician who sponsors or heads a candidate list. Very rarely are parliamentarians chosen for their intrinsic merits. Therefore, the notion that a minister must have, first, won an election, or quite simply not participated in an election at all, means that he or she generally must either be beholden to one of the more powerful political leaders or avoided the risk of competing for a parliamentary seat.

What makes Ziad Baroud, otherwise an excellent minister, more legitimate in the cabinet than, let’s say, Misbah al-Ahdab? Baroud didn’t seek popular legitimacy (nor did he have to), while Ahdab, several times elected to parliament, lost last June because he stood as an independent. Why should Ahdab be penalized even as a petition is circulating to bring Baroud back? One can be a fine minister but a poor parliamentarian; one can be superlative at both; or one can be abysmal at both. There is no correlation between the roles of minister and parliamentarian, and popular approval certainly does not qualify one to sit in the cabinet, where many good decisions may necessitate being unpopular.

Which brings us back to Gebran Bassil. His defeat in Batroun is not enough to deny him a cabinet portfolio. If we need to judge him, then let’s do so according to different benchmarks. How did he fare as Telecommunications minister? As a layman all I can say is that while I may be paying less for my mobile telephone communications, rarely has service been as bad. Conversations are routinely cut off and most of the time it’s very difficult to hear what a correspondent is saying. The cellular system has crashed several times this summer from the overload, which is undoubtedly a black mark against the minister.

But is that enough to say that Bassil should not return to the cabinet? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that if you’re not going to evaluate ministers by their performance, then what will you evaluate them by? But no, in that unless parliament and the cabinet introduce a systematic method of assessing ministerial performance, it makes no sense to pick and choose who deserves to be removed from office or denied a cabinet seat.

That leaves us with the single valid measuring stick to determine whether Bassil should again be a minister: the principles the Aounists themselves espouse, which in fact concern no one but the Aounists. For a movement that has often insisted, and very loudly, that it represents change and reform, nepotism is something to steer away from. Michel Aoun doesn’t have a son, so he’s advancing the career of his son-in-law, whom he wishes to see take over the leadership of his movement. With greater reluctance, Aoun also gave his nephew Alain a helpful push prior to the June elections, by asking Shakib Qortbawi to withdraw from the Baabda list on his behalf. Ironically, Alain Aoun, among the most sensible people around his uncle, is on bad terms with Gebran Bassil, and would like nothing more than for Hariri and Sleiman to have their way.

It must be demoralizing for the Aounist faithful to watch as their movement turns into a family affair. That’s not to say that Alain Aoun or Gebran Bassil are unpopular among their followers; quite the contrary. However, they are also emerging as major rivals for leadership, which means that the Free Patriotic Movement is beginning to look little different than other family-based political organizations in Lebanon.

Does that exclude Bassil from a ministry, or for that matter Alain Aoun? No. The question is whether other deserving Aounists, like the handful of voiceless parliamentarians who crave a reward for having stuck by Michel Aoun through thick and thin, can continue to stomach their secondary status. Instead of making such a fuss over Bassil, for example, shouldn’t Aoun be promoting more credible people like Qortbawi?

Of course that’s for the Aounists to thrash out. If Michel Aoun insists on Gebran Bassil, fine. Let the Aounists clean up their internal mess, but without trying to assure us that they represent something different.