The Lebanese opposition dealt a sharp blow to the government on Sunday when voters in the Metn mountainous area elected an unknown candidate to the parliamentary seat held by a scion of a feudal family who was assassinated last year.

The winner was Kamil Khoury, a political novice backed by former General Michel Aoun, head of the Free Patriotic party which is allied with the Shia opposition Shia Hizbollah movement.

Khoury defeated by a narrow margin Amin Gemayel, who served as president from 1982-88 and was the father of Pierre Gemayel, a legislator slain last year.  His grandfather, also called Pierre, was the founder in 1936 of the right-wing Maronite Phalange party, modelled on fascist movements in Europe in the run-up to World War II. Amin Gemayel is the current head of the Phalange, which launched the civil war by attacking a bus load of Palestinians in April 1975.

The divisions
The result exposes the divisions in the 18 per cent Maronite Christian community which dominated the Lebanese political scene until the 1975-90 civil war.

 While two-thirds of the Maronite vote in the Metn constituency was claimed by the Gemayel camp, Khoury had the support of one-third of the Maronites there as well as Sunnis, Shiites, and Armenians.   Aoun’s candidates took the majority in the Metn in the 2005 parliamentary poll but Gemayel did well in the by-election because of a strong sympathy vote. It is ironic that Aoun and Gemayel should be on opposite sides of the confrontation between the government and opposition because Gemayel, on leaving office, appointed Aoun, then army chief, to be prime minister.  This amounted to a flagrant violation of the country's constitution which lays down a power-sharing arrangement according to which the president and army head are always Maronite Christians, prime ministers are Sunnis, and parliamentary speakers are Shias. 

The loss of the Metn seat was partly compensated for a seat in Beirut won by the candidate of the Future party, the mainstay of the government.  However, the Metn battle is seen as the opening engagement in the struggle between government and opposition forces over the presidency. 

A new head of state will be chosen by parliament and both Aoun and Gemayel are likely to stand. The poll results could decide Lebanon’s political alignment in the contest for influence in W Asia between the US, on one hand, and Syria and Iran on the other.