LEBANON: Saad Hariri, son of assassinated former prime minister Rafik Hariri, swept parliamentary elections in the capital on Sunday, inheriting the public mantle left by his slain father and shoring up his chances of becoming prime minister, writes Megan K Stack
A soft-spoken billionaire businessman who insists he was not groomed for politics, Saad Hariri (35) headed a bloc of candidates who won all 19 of the city's seats in the first election since Syrian troops ended their 29-year domination of Lebanon.
Mr 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, but the victory was hailed as a triumph of public confidence for the Hariri family. His 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 Mr 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."
Saudi-reared and Georgetown University-educated, Mr Hariri ascended to the head of Lebanon's Sunni Muslim community after his father's death in February. 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 19th. Once a parliament has been elected, legislators will 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.
"There is no alternative in Lebanon," Adnan Iskander, a political-science professor at the American University of Beirut, said of Mr Hariri becoming the next prime minister. "There are no serious contenders in the Sunni camp."
After his father's assassination, Mr Hariri returned from Saudi Arabia, where he oversaw his family's empire. In the tumultuous weeks that followed, he burst into politics out of a conviction that his father's work must continue.
Mr Hariri, a 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.
Asked would he would become prime minister, Mr Hariri switched in 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.
Rafik Hariri showered Beirut with a fortune he made in Saudi Arabia, rebuilt the city centre and pushed a traumatised nation to overcome its 15-year civil war.
In death, Rafik Hariri has become a symbol of anti-Syrian resistance. Although Syria denies any involvement in the assassination, the bomb that killed him pushed Lebanese protesters into the streets and led to the withdrawal of Syrian soldiers under intense pressure from the international community.
As the polls closed on Sunday, young men drove wild circles around the vast limestone mansion erected by the Hariri family in the urban tangle of west Beirut, honking their horns and thrusting victory signs out of cars papered with pictures of both Hariris.
At home, Saad Hariri sat quietly beneath golden chandeliers in a vast reception hall ringed with outsized photographs of his father. He wore blue jeans and a blazer and blinked back tears when asked about the voting. "Every time [ I visited a polling station] I wanted to cry because the people, you know, are still hurt," he said. "And we are still hurt."
Mr Hariri moves a bit stiffly, glances around uncertainly before the cameras. He has been running the family business since the mid-1990s and was chosen over his older brother Bahaa Hariri to inherit his father's political career.
The family fled the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and Saad Hariri grew up in France and Saudi Arabia. So close are his ties with the Saudi royal family that he flew to Riyadh on the eve of the election to visit the ailing Saudi ruler King Fahd. He flew back to Beirut just in time to tour polling stations.
Mr Hariri wasn't going to lose. His Beirut list, which included candidates from the militant Hizbullah group and Christian parties, faced only a smattering of opponents from leftist and Muslim parties.
His bloc had sealed up nine of Beirut's 19 parliamentary seats before the voting began either because they were uncontested or because all of the candidates were in league with Mr Hariri. But that didn't seem to be enough for him. He repeatedly begged the people of Beirut to cast their ballots - even if the winner was a foregone conclusion.
On that count, he lost. Turnout was estimated to be about 6 per cent lower than during the 2000 elections.