The UK, as I’m sure you all know, has just had its third national vote in as many years and this time millions of voters told the British prime minister, Theresa May, of the Conservative Party, what they thought of her hubris at calling an election she didn’t need and her subsequent refusal to debate with the other party leaders during the short campaign. So, Mrs May effectively lost because she didn’t win big.
If only the Lebanese, whose country is economically and socially falling apart, had the courage to seize a similar nettle and abandon their destructive habit of voting in the same gang of useless scoundrels time after time.
To be fair, it would help if they were actually given the chance to make themselves heard. For years now the political class has been fighting over what electoral law to use (I won’t explain as it’s mind-numbingly complicated) with the latest estimate pointing to a mid-2018 poll. It will only have been nine years since the last national ballot. Why rush things?
But even when elections are held, the Lebanese don’t really vote according to “issues”, unlike in the UK where the minimum wage, income tax levels, benefits, the NHS and even potholes have all at some point or another been election issues. By and large, Lebanese voters seem to be content with voting for the guy – it’s almost always a guy – who they think has got their back and from whom they expect practically nothing in return.
I say "practically nothing in return" because there are a few rudimentary quae pro quibus. Before the last elections in 2008, I was told my drive would be tarmacked for free if I voted for a certain candidate. I turned down the offer. Others didn't, while many more received modest cash payments in return for their vote (those with big families get more moolah). And that is about it in terms of the Lebanese campaigning.
In the UK, voters were treated to a whole raft of electoral pledges on the economy and related issues, such as bringing energy, water, railways, buses, the postal service and care work back into public ownership; promoting small businesses, cooperatives and mutuals; the roll out of high-speed broadband; eliminating the government’s deficit on day-to-day spending within five years; investing £250 billion (Dh1.17 trillion) over 10 years in upgrading the UK economy; establishing a National Investment Bank to invest in critical infrastructure and skills and creating a £100bn programme of capital investment aimed at stimulating growth across all areas of the UK.
Back in Lebanon, most people don’t care about or don’t want to know how we are going to pay back a gross public debt of US$71.65bn (a debt-to-GDP ration of about 170 per cent); curb inflation, manage our water resources, improve our electricity supply, increase broadband and protect the environment. We have terrible roads, no public transport to talk of, no job-creation schemes, no policy on small businesses and certainly no debate about personal income tax and how it could be raised to pay for the aforementioned items instead of, for example, propping up an inefficient national grid to the tune of over $1bn a year.
Indeed, any politician who decided that structuring a way out of the national debt and making it the cornerstone of his parliamentary campaign would be dismissed as a nerdy do-gooder. And all the while the top Lebanese banks that are earning interest on the debt they have lent the state are 33 per cent owned by the politicians who got the country into the mess in the first place.
Part of the problem lies in the system itself. The current government is a coalition of sorts. All sects must be represented – something that is so important to the Lebanese – but nothing really gets done because of the inevitable infighting. And yet we are a country whose entire raison d’être is quite literally the art of the deal.
We only have ourselves to blame.
Michael Karam is a freelance writer who lives between Beirut and Brighton.
business@thenational.ae
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