Beirut V – Minet El Hosn electoral district

Beirut V - Minet El Hosn
Former constituency for the Parliament of Lebanon
Governorate	Beirut
Electorate	13,890
Former constituency
Created	1952
Abolished	1957
Number of members	1 (Minorities)
MP	Joseph Chader (1953-1957)

Beirut V – Minet El Hosn was an electoral district in Lebanon, used in the 1953 parliamentary election. The electoral district covered three neighbourhoods of Beirut and elected a Minorities parliamentarian. Joseph Chader of the Kataeb Party was elected from the district in 1953.

New election law

The 1953 election was the first parliamentary election in Lebanon with a new electoral system which allowed candidates to win with a plurality of votes, rather than requiring a second round.^[1] Female universal suffrage was introduced whilst voting was made compulsory for men, as per the November 1952 Election Law.^[2] Moreover, the number of seats in the parliament was reduced from 77 to 44.^[3] Most of the electoral districts now elected only a single parliamentarian, rather than the usual system in Lebanon where several parliamentarians are elected from a larger district.^[2] The November 1952 Election Law had also abolished the separate seat for Armenian Catholics.^[2]

Beirut V - Minet el Hosn covered three neighbourhoods (quartiers) of the capital Beirut; Minet El Hosn, Dar Mreisse and Port.^[4] The district elected a single parliamentarian, belonging to Minorities.^[2] The district had 13,890 registered voters.^[2]

Candidates in 1953 election

The contenders for the Beirut V seat were Joseph Chader, Edmond Rabbath, Farid Jubran, Chafic Nassif and Jemil Attié.^[2]

Joseph Chader

Chader was the vice chairman of the Kataeb Party.^[2] He had won the Armenian Catholic seat in the 1951 parliamentary election.^[2] As the Kataeb Party had suffered a backlash in the 1951 election, it only fielded two candidates in 1953, Chader and Maurice Gemayel in Beirut II (Achrafieh-Rmeil-Saifi).^[4] Chader had the support from a large part of the Jewish community, which tended to support the Kataeb Party.^[2]

Edmond Rabbath

Rabbath was the candidate of the National Call Party.^[4] Born in Aleppo and educated at the Sorbonne in Paris, he had been one of the architects of the 1928 Syrian constitution.^[5][6] He was a prominent Syrian nationalist.^[5][6] Rabbath had been a leading figure in the National Bloc in Syria in the 1930s.^[7] Before the 1953 election he had become a Lebanese citizen.^[6] His candidature was supported by the Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignatius Gabriel I Tappouni.^[2]

Chafic Nassif

Nassif had been one of the founders of the Kataeb Party. But he left the party and became a follower of Camille Chamoun. He was a lawyer by profession.^[8]

Farid Jubran

Jubran, a Latin Catholic, was one of the co-founders of the Progressive Socialist Party.^[9][10]

Voting

Chader won the seat, obtaining 2,081 votes (40.9%). Rabbath got 1,922 votes (37.8%), Nassif 1,097 votes (21.6%), Jubran 646 votes (12.7%) and Attié 55 votes (1.1%).^[2] 41.8% of the registered voters cast their votes.^[2]

In the subsequent 1957 parliamentary election, multi-member electoral districts were reintroduced. The neighbourhoods of the 1953 Beirut V district were included in the Muslim-dominated second district of Beirut.^[2]

References

1. Dieter Nohlen; Florian Grotz; Christof Hartmann (15 November 2001). Elections in Asia and the Pacific: A Data Handbook : Volume I: Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia: Volume I: Middle East, Central Asia, and South Asia. OUP Oxford. p. 183. ISBN 978-0-19-153041-8.
2. Messerlian, Zaven. Armenian Participation in the Lebanese Legislative Elections 1934–2009. Beirut: Haigazian University Press, 2014. pp. 119-120, 129-130, 135
3. Études internationales. Vol. 18 (3-4 ed.). Centre québécois de relations internationales. 1987. p. 592.
4. John Pierre Entelis (1974). Pluralism and Party Transformation in Lebanon: Al-Kataʼib, 1936-1970. BRILL. p. 135. ISBN 90-04-03911-2.
5. Asher Kaufman (30 June 2014). Reviving Phoenicia: The Search for Identity in Lebanon. I.B.Tauris. pp. 205–206. ISBN 978-1-78076-779-6.
6. Pierre Rondot (1955). Les chrétiens d'Orient. J. Peyronnet. p. 131.
7. Party, Government and Freedom in the Muslim World: Three Articles Reprinted from the Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2d Ed., V. 3. Brill Archive. 1968. p. 10. GGKEY:W03HHDW70GZ.
8. Michael Craig Hudson (1968). The Precarious Republic: Political Modernization in Lebanon. Random House. p. 165.
9. Rola El-Husseini (2012). Pax Syriana: Elite Politics in Postwar Lebanon. Syracuse University Press. p. 242. ISBN 978-0-8156-3304-4.
10. Ḥassān Ḥallāq; حلاق، حسان (1 January 2010). موسوعة العائلات البيروتية: الجذور التاريخية للعائلات البيروتية ذات الأصول العربية واللبنانية والعثمانية مع صور ووثائق ومعلومات نادرة. دار النهضة العربية،. ISBN 978-614-402-141-5.