"Still Standing ..."

Gary Gambill in the MEM, here via Syria Comment

"....The genius of Aoun's memorandum of understanding with Hezbollah was that it not only gave voice to a slew of popular Christian demands (e.g. expatriate voting, rejection of Palestinian resettlement in Lebanon, anti-corruption reform), but also offered up the endorsement of Hezbollah - a compelling route to implementation in view of the fact that Shiites and Christians comprise roughly two-thirds of the electorate. The memorandum met with overwhelming support among Christians,[14] in spite of the fact that most continued to have a favorable view of both the United States and the Bush administration......

The stream of anti-Hezbollah rhetoric from March 14 politicians over the past three years was fueled mainly by the group's alignment with the FPM, not its conflict with Israel or violations of state sovereignty (and certainly not by the expectation that strident rhetoric will encourage its disarmament). ....

Notwithstanding the timely defection of Michel Murr (considerably boosting the coalition's strength in the 8-seat district of Metn), the prospects of March 14 defeating Aoun in majority Christian districts were regarded as shaky in the weeks leading up to the elections. The coalition's waning brand appeal was evident in the large number of pro-March 14 Christian candidates running as nominal independents, the acrimonious departure of the widely respected former MP Nassib Lahoud from the race, and a leaked videotape showing Jumblatt contemptuously ridiculing Geagea with an anti-Maronite slur.

Salvation for the coalition came from a string of eleventh hour developments. High profile visits to Lebanon by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice-president Joe Biden were widely credited with striking the right balance of tacit support for the coalition and nominal diplomatic neutrality (in contrast to the interventionist rhetoric of the Bush administration, which played into Aoun's hands), though it's not clear how decisive an impact this had. More significant was a flurry of sensationalist foreign accusations against Hezbollah on the eve of the vote.

In April, the Egyptian government announced that it had uncovered a Hezbollah-directed network planning to carry out terrorist attacks in Egypt. Although it appears likely that the network was merely smuggling weapons to Gaza, the specter of Shiites compromising the sovereignty of a leading (Sunni) Arab government was bound to reverberate in Lebanon. Similar accusations were leveled against Hezbollah by Azerbaijan and Yemen in the weeks before the elections. On May 24, the German news magazine Der Spiegel quoted "sources close to the tribunal" as saying that UN investigators had linked Hezbollah to the assassination of Hariri. Although the veracity of the report was questionable, the symbolic impact of the accusation likely contributed to the extraordinarily high turnout of Sunni voters in the majority Christian district of Zahleh, which produced a March 14 victory predicted by few pollsters and analysts prior to the election (the turnout of Shiite swing voters was critical for Aoun in other Christian majority districts, but not unexpectedly so).

Israeli officials helped lend credibility to March 14 rhetoric ......... Ehud Barak stated that the coalition's defeat would "give us a freedom of action that we did not have completely in July 2006." In the days before the election, Israel conducted large-scale military maneuvers on the border with Lebanon.

All of this paved the way for the spectacular intercession of the 85-year-old Maronite patriarch. ..... warning voters of "a threat to Lebanon's character and Arab identity".......

Although the electoral results left the overall balance of power between March 14 and the opposition largely unchanged, the coalition clearly gained a more legitimate mandate. The distribution of seats was at odds with the popular vote (54% in favor of the opposition),[38] but not nearly to the same degree as the 2005 election - and this time around, everybody accepted the rules beforehand...........

Contrary to the tenor of many Western media reports, however, the election results were a defeat for Aoun only in the sense that he did not win a clear mandate to speak on behalf of the Christian community. However, no one (outside of the Aounist camp) expected him to do so. His share of the Christian vote was around 49-52%, roughly en par with previous expectations (and with the 2007 by-election). Though his bloc expanded to only 27 seats due to the unexpected loss of Zahleh,  it is nevertheless unprecedented for so large a plurality of the Christian community to be united under one political agenda. The March 14 coalition has more Christian MPs, but they have too many conflicting allegiances to be considered a single bloc. The Lebanese Forces and the Phalangists each received 5 seats, with independents and subordinates of Hariri and Jumblatt comprising the rest....."