Boss-Based Political Parties Die Off with the Boss

When Lebanon's former president Michel Aoun passes away - he's 88 years old - his "party" (Free Patriotic Movement) will surely die with him. This is what happens to institutions founded on the aura of the boss. The path of history is littered with the cadavers of political parties that were once founded around the person of the "Boss": Hitler (Germany's National Socialism or NAZI party), Mussolini (Italy's National Fascist Party), Peron (Argentina's Justicialist Party), De Gaulle (France's Gaullist Party), etc.

Here in the Near East, most parties are created around the person of a boss. Two interesting examples go to prove my argument:

- The Baath Party: Founded by Michel Aflaq, but not around his person. The Baath Party managed to seize power in Syria and Iraq, but its Arabist ideology stayed away from creating a cult around Michel Aflaq himself. This is perhaps due to the fact that Aflaq was a Christian, which is a handicap in Muslim countries. The Baath Party remains in power in Syria, while Iraq was "de-Baathified" after the US invasion of Iraq.

- The SSNP (Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party): Founded by Anton Saadeh AND around the person of Anton Saadeh. He's a leader for life, even after his death. The cult of the person of Saadeh is central to the ideology, since (as I have described before in: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/06/dying-nazis-of-near-east.html) Saadeh essentially cloned Hitler's Nazi Party in creating his own. Saadeh too was a Christian, which explains why his party never took a foothold in Muslim Syria and Iraq, but managed to survive in semi-Christian Lebanon). Still, because the party is built around the myth of the "Great Leader" Anton Saadeh, it is nowadays fading away from Lebanese political consciousness: In last May's elections, it lost the only seat it had managed to keep for a number of years. 

The Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) of Michel Aoun (a Christian Maronite) was created on the heels of Aoun's "rebellion" in the late 1980s against the concerted efforts of the international community to force Lebanon's Christians to the political backstage and bring Lebanon's Sunni Muslims to the fore, in a supreme act of blackmailed submission of the international community to Arab (Saudi, Emirati, Qatari, Kuwaiti, etc.) oil and will. After 15 years in exile, Aoun returned to Lebanon after the assassination of the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister Rafik Hariri who had become Lebanon's top man. 

Aoun proceeded to create his FPM Party and insert it in the absurd political theater of Lebanon. No one can deny that the FPM was created around the aura of Aoun, the rebel General who fought the Syrian occupation, his own Christian allies (Lebanese Forces) and the entire international community before being forcibly dislodged from the presidential palace where he had bunkered himself in 1988-1990. In this posture, he managed to attract a Lebanese population of diverse sectarian persuasions, exhausted by 15 years of wars and foreign occupations. For many Lebanese, Aoun became the legendary David fighting off the giant Goliath, except that David lost this battle. His return to Lebanon in 2005 offered him a chance to redress the vicissitudes of his history. But others got in the way.

Sadly for him, Boss Aoun did not have any sons - he had three very capable daughters - which is a terrible handicap in primitive third-worldly patriarchal Lebanon. But he had three sons-in-law. One of them by the name of Gebran Bassil (a.k.a. Zebran Basij) leveraged his sleeping with the Boss's daughter to catapult himself onto the political stage and slowly attempt to take over the dynasty as it were. In a Rasputinian way, Basij made deals with Aoun's erstwhile enemies (Shiite Muslim Hezbollah) and became a kingmaker who brought Aoun to the presidency. But like all Faustian deals, it all ended tragically: Two-faced, turncoat Aoun lost most of his Christian base and, under his presidency, Lebanon collapsed in virtually every way you can imagine. Under Aoun, Lebanon became a failed state that is likely to disappear as we know it.

But now, with Aoun's failure in his rebellion and then again during his term as president, and nearing his natural demise, the FPM has lost its (mostly Christian) base, and indeed lost many seats in last May's legislative elections. It managed to hold on to some seats only because it fielded candidates on Hezbollah's and Amal's lists; in other words, these Christian-rights defenders were elected by Shiite, not Christian, voters. Watching the demise of his father-in-law and his legacy as well, Zebran Basij knows that he's got to do something to keep the FPM alive. As with most political parties in Lebanon, the differences between parties are not ideological. They are sectarian, tribal and regional. For example, you have at least five Maronite parties - Marada (Frangiyeh clan), FPM (Aoun clan), Lebanese Forces (Geagea clan), Kataeb (Gemayel clan), the National Liberals (Chamoun clan), and others. They are all based on the sectarian-regional criterion of being Maronites, but are otherwise ideologically identical. Nothing separates them ideologically, as in Socialist, Liberal, Democrat, Christian-Democrat, Green, Center, Left, Communist, etc..  In Chamoun's case, "liberal" is a mistranslation from Arabic "free" and should not be equated with the "liberal" parties of the west. There is nothing "liberal" in the Chamoun clan party. Some of these parties survive, as ineffectual as they are, because their modern leaders are the sons or cousins or other relatives of the original founder, and bear his name. In Lebanon, it's all in the gonads.

Unfortunately for Zebran Basij, he is not a "Aoun" and is not genetically linked to Michel Aoun, and so he knows that his father-in-law's party (now his own) stands to vanish when Michel Aoun dies, just as other parties have vanished when their "dear leaders" passed away. Since he himself has no aura to leverage, you'll see him nowadays flailing about, cussing friend and foe, gradually sinking in the political moving sands, struggling to remain afloat. The FPM was founded around the idea of the rebel, though tragic, hero Michel Aoun. Basij is tragic, but he's no hero, and is not a "Aoun". Most of the cadres of the FPM were brought on board thanks to the persona of Michel Aoun, and many of them have a profound distaste for Basij: They all won elections and became party cadres on that basis, but Basij kept failing to win elections, yet Aoun kept propping him up by giving him ministerial portfolios and later imposing him as party chief. 

Between the resentment inside the party and Basij's abysmal performance, the FPM's fate will likely match that of all these other "dear-leader-based" or "boss-based" parties: If not death and oblivion, then ghosts.