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Journalism of Courage
Saad Hariri, the son of assassinated former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, swept parliamentary elections in the capital Beirut on Monday, inheriting the public mantle left by his slain father and shoring up his chances of becoming Prime Minister.
A soft-spoken billionaire businessman who insists he was not groomed for politics, 35-year-old Saad al-Hariri headed a bloc of candidates that won all 19 of the city’s seats in the first election since Syrian troops ended their 29-year presence in Lebanon.
Saad Hariri, who presides over his father’s business empire, is now poised to take over the public role left vacant by his father’s killing four months ago. Voter turnout was sluggish on Sunday, but the victory was hailed as a triumph of public confidence for the Hariri family.
Saad’s campaign rhetoric was heavy with invocations of ‘‘the martyr’’, and pictures of the slain patriarch were plastered on shop windows, cars and even bottles of mineral water. ‘‘Today national unity was won in the face of the old regime. Lebanon is united in you,’’ a beaming Saad Hariri told hundreds of raucous well-wishers who thronged the streets outside the family’s mansion, beating drums, tossing fistfuls of flower petals and screaming his name. ‘‘This is a win for Rafik Hariri.’’
The Saudi-reared, Georgetown University-educated Saad Hariri ascended to the head of Lebanon’s Sunni Muslims after his father’s death. Despite his relative youth and inexperience, the debate waged across Beirut these days is not whether he will become Prime Minister, but how soon he’ll get the job.
Voting will continue every Sunday until June 19. Once a parliament has been elected, legislators will meet to choose a Prime Minister. Lebanon’s Constitution, which apportions power among the religious sects, stipulates that the position must be held by a Sunni Muslim.
After his father’s killing, Saad Hariri rushed home from Saudi Arabia, where he oversaw his family’s multi-billion-dollar empire. In the tumultuous weeks that followed, he burst into politics out of a conviction that his father’s work must continue, he said. But Saad Hariri, the married father of two, bristles at the suggestion that he was raised to be his father’s successor. ‘‘We were not a dynasty in politics. We never wanted to be a dynasty,’’ he said in an interview on Sunday.
Asked whether he would become PM, Saad switched within a few seconds from coy—‘‘It’s a secret for me to know and you to find out’’—to modest—‘‘I don’t have experience, one has to be honest with oneself’’—to resigned—‘‘I’m a hard-working person, and if it comes to it, one should take up the challenge.’’
Fitting into his father’s footsteps will prove no mean task. —LAT-WP
