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Map of the Strait of Hormuz. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
March 3 (Asia Today) — Concerns about a potential “second oil shock” are spreading as tensions rise around the Strait of Hormuz, but Japanese analysts say a prolonged blockade is structurally unlikely because China and Iran would suffer the greatest damage.
The Strait of Hormuz, a strategic chokepoint through which roughly 20% of global seaborne crude oil passes, has effectively entered a state of disruption, rattling energy markets and financial investors.
However, Japan’s Sankei Shimbun reported Tuesday that a sustained closure would impose excessive costs on all parties involved.
The first factor is China. According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, China accounts for the largest share of crude oil imports transiting the strait, about 30%. An estimated 40% to 50% of China’s total crude oil imports pass through Hormuz.
China’s strategic petroleum reserves are estimated to cover about 110 days of demand. With its economy already strained by a property downturn and youth unemployment, a prolonged surge in oil prices and supply disruptions could intensify pressure on manufacturing, inflation and exchange rates.
The second factor is Iran. While Tehran appears to hold leverage by controlling the strait, its economy depends heavily on oil exports. China has remained Iran’s primary buyer even under sanctions, accounting for roughly 90% of Iranian crude exports.
A long-term blockade would likely reduce export volumes and slash foreign currency earnings for Iran itself. Japanese financial officials were quoted as saying that maintaining a full blockade over an extended period would not be a rational choice. While it may serve as a short-term bargaining tool, a prolonged standoff could inflict serious damage on Iran’s economy.
The third variable is the United States. Since the shale boom, the United States has become the world’s largest crude oil producer. Only about 3% of U.S. crude imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz, meaning a blockade would not directly paralyze the U.S. economy. Although higher global oil prices could weigh on American consumers, analysts say it is unlikely to serve as a decisive strategic weapon against Washington.
Taken together, a prolonged blockade would amount to what analysts describe as an “asymmetric self-harm” strategy, imposing heavy political and economic costs on all sides. Short-term price spikes and volatility are possible, but sustaining such measures over time would be difficult.
Japan holds strategic petroleum reserves equivalent to more than 250 days of supply and says it has sufficient capacity to absorb short-term shocks. South Korea also maintains government and private stockpiles capable of covering several months of demand.
While rising oil prices would burden South Korea’s trade-dependent economy, energy experts say fears of an immediate physical supply cutoff may be overstated. They stress the need to distinguish between short-term price volatility and actual disruptions to physical supply.
— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI
© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.
Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260303010000544
A shock-and-awe campaign laying down a tsunami of bombs. An enemy succumbing rapidly under overwhelming firepower. And a triumphant U.S. president trumpeting a quick and easy campaign.
In 2003, President George W. Bush strode confidently on the deck of an aircraft carrier less than five weeks after he ordered the invasion of Iraq and declared the “end of major combat operations” under a banner proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.”
It proved anything but.
The invasion became a meat grinder, leaving thousands of Americans and possibly more than a million Iraqis dead. It unleashed forces whose effects are felt in the region and beyond to this day.
More than two decades later, another U.S. president attacked another Persian Gulf nation, promising rapid success in yet another Middle East adventure that he says will remake the region.
President Trump and his staff have vehemently rejected any comparison between “Operation Epic Fury,” launched Saturday, and “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a pugnacious news conference, insisting, “This is not Iraq. This is not endless.”
Yet the assault on Iran — almost four times larger than Iraq with more than double its population — presents no lack of challenges, ones that could spread chaos far beyond Iran’s borders and become a defining feature of Trump’s presidency.
In many ways, analysts say, toppling Iran’s leadership represents a much more complex task than Iraq ever did. Iraq was a state with deep sectarian divisions that was largely dominated by a single dictator: Saddam Hussein.
The Iran that emerged after the 1978-79 Islamic Revolution had a supreme leader, but Iran also developed an elaborate system of governance. That includes a president, a parliament and varying governmental, military and religious hierarchies, noted Paul Salem, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.
“Unlike Saddam’s Iraq, the Iranian state is multi-institutional and hence much more resilient — and, yes, not as vulnerable,” Salem said. “And hostility to the United States and Israel is at the heart of the Islamic Revolution — baked into the state.”
Here are some of the ways the Iran attacks could develop into the very scenarios Trump once derided in his days as the antiwar candidate:
For now, the U.S. and Israel have wielded air power to pound Tehran into submission. In the first minutes of the joint operation, a 200-plane fleet — Israel’s largest — struck more than 500 targets in Iran, according to the Israeli military. One such strike killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Iran is still fighting back, lobbing missiles at Israel, Persian Gulf nations, Jordan and other areas with U.S. bases in the region. The U.S. has the qualitative and quantitative edge of materiel to eventually prevail, but Iran’s capabilities will not make it easy, as the losses in service members and planes have demonstrated in the last two days.
And wars have never been won with air power alone. Rather than relying on boots on the ground, Trump expects ordinary Iranians to finish the job for him.
“When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take,” he said in a video address on the first day of the campaign.
During the Arab Spring of 2011, protesters throughout the Middle East took to the streets to demand change. But those efforts mostly did not lead to significant reforms and, in some countries, prompted further repression.
In Iran, it’s true many people would welcome the Islamic Republic’s demise — as many Iraqis rejoiced at Hussein’s fall. But it’s unlikely that mostly unarmed protesters will triumph in a confrontation against enforcers from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or its volunteer wing, the Basij.
It’s also difficult to gauge how many of Iran’s 93 million people despise the government enough to rise up against it.
Meanwhile, Trump has left the door open for dispatching U.S. troops, but the math of such a deployment raises doubts.
According to the U.S. Army, counterinsurgency doctrine dictates 20 to 25 troops for every 1,000 inhabitants to achieve stability. In the case of Iran that would entail deploying 1.9 million people — almost all the U.S. military’s active duty, reserve and National Guard personnel.
At this point, it’s not clear that decapitation of much of Iran’s leadership class will produce any real change in government, much less a successor inclined to bend to U.S. wishes. The top echelons of the Islamic Republic boast a deep bench of mostly hard-liners — not surprising, perhaps, for a nation that has braced for attack for years, if not decades.
Whatever new leadership that does emerge could rally around the “martyrdom” of Khamenei. Not especially popular in life, he appears to have become, in death, a rallying cry for defiance. And martyrs are exalted in Shiite Islam, Iran’s prevalent faith.
“He was the religious leader of the Shiites, so it’s sort of like killing the pope,” Salem said. “And he’s more popular dying as a martyr, than, say, of a heart attack. … He went out in style, no doubt about it.”
When the U.S. occupied Iraq, the expectation was that whatever came next would be a fervent U.S. ally, an idea perhaps best captured in the notion in Washington that a grateful Iraqi populace would shower U.S. troops with flowers. That didn’t happen. And in the Darwin-esque culling of leaders that followed, the ones that emerged victorious had little love for the U.S.
One of them was Nouri Al-Maliki, a Shiite supremacist whose policies were blamed for fueling years of sectarian bloodletting, and whose loyalties often seemed more aligned with Tehran than Washington.
Meanwhile, Tehran, playing on its proximity and deep ties to the new Iraqi ruling class, was able to steer Iraq — a majority Shiite country — deeper into its orbit.
After the Iraqi government — with the help of a U. S.-led coalition — pushed Islamic State out of Iraq in 2017, Iran was able to embed allied militias into Iraq’s armed services. That created the paradoxical situation of Tehran-aligned fighters wielding U.S.-supplied materiel.
Iraq has yet to emerge from Iran’s shadow. After Iraq’s most recent elections, Maliki seems poised to become prime minister once more, prompting Trump to write on Truth Social, “Because of his insane policies and ideologies, if elected, the United States of America will no longer help Iraq.”
Iran’s population is diverse; an estimated two-thirds of Iranians are Persian, while minorities include Kurds, Baloch, Arabs and Azeris.
Those minorities have long-standing grievances against the ruling majority. It’s possible that Trump’s campaign and the resulting disorder could fuel separatist tensions.
Just last month, Iranian Kurdish factions joined together in a coalition that they said would seek the overthrow of the Islamic Republic “to achieve the Kurdish people’s right to self-determination, and to establish a national and democratic entity based on the political will of the Kurdish nation in Iranian Kurdistan.”
Over the decades, the Islamic Republic created a network that at its peak stretched from Pakistan to Lebanon.
It was a fearsome constellation of paramilitary factions and amenable governments that became known as the Axis of Resistance. It included Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestinian lands, Yemen’s Houthis, and militias in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
After Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, Israel — and, eventually, the United States — launched offensive campaigns to defang the groups.
Although weakened, the factions still survive, and could form a powerful, transnational and motivated insurgency when the time comes to fight whatever emerges if the Islamic Republic falls.
Bulos reported from Khartoum, Sudan, and McDonnell from Mexico City.
The killing of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in a United States-Israeli air campaign has sent shockwaves through the Middle East, decapitating the leadership of the “axis of resistance” at its most critical moment.
For decades, this network of groups allied with Iran was Tehran’s forward line of defence. But today, with its commander-in-chief dead and its logistical arteries cut, the alliance looks less like a unified war machine and more like a series of isolated islands.
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Hassan Ahmadian, a professor at the University of Tehran, warned that the era of strategic patience is over and the Iranian government is now prepared to “burn everything” in response to the attacks.
While Tehran promised to retaliate against the US and Israel “with a force they have never experienced before”, the reaction from its key proxies in Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq revealed a deep hesitation driven by local existential threats that may outweigh their ideological loyalty to a fallen leader.
In Beirut, the response from Hezbollah, long considered the crown jewel among Iran’s regional allies, has been cautiously calibrated.
After Sunday’s announcement of Khamenei’s death, the group issued a statement condemning the attack as the “height of criminality”. However, Al Jazeera correspondent in Beirut Mazen Ibrahim noted that the language used was defensive, not offensive.
“If one dismantles the linguistic structure of the statement, the complexity of Hezbollah’s position becomes clear,” Ibrahim said. “The secretary-general spoke of ‘confronting aggression’, which refers to a defensive posture. … He did not explicitly threaten to attack Israel or launch revenge operations.”
This caution is rooted in a new strategic reality. Since the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s government in Syria in late 2024, the “land bridge” that supplied Hezbollah has been severed. Ali Akbar Dareini, a Tehran-based researcher, noted that this loss “cut the ground link with Lebanon”, leaving the group physically isolated.
Now with top leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) killed alongside Khamenei, Hezbollah appears paralysed – caught between a battered domestic front in Lebanon and a vacuum of orders from Tehran.
In Yemen, the Houthis face an even more volatile calculus.
In his first televised address after the strikes on Iran began on Saturday, the group’s leader, Abdel-Malik al-Houthi, declared his forces “fully prepared for any developments”. Yet his rhetoric notably emphasised that “Iran is strong” and “its response will be decisive,” a phrasing that analysts interpreted as an attempt to deflect the immediate burden of war away from the Houthis.
The Houthis are under immense pressure. While they have successfully disrupted Red Sea shipping and fired missiles at Tel Aviv, they now face a renewed threat at home.
The internationally recognised Yemeni government, having won a power struggle against southern separatists, has sensed a shift in momentum. Defence Minister Taher al-Aqili recently declared: “The index of operations is heading towards the capital, Sanaa,” which the Houthis control. The statement signalled a potential ground offensive to retake Houthi territory.
This places the Houthis in a bind. While Houthi negotiator Mohammed Abdulsalam recently met with Iranian official Ali Larijani in Muscat, Oman, to discuss “unity of the arenas”, the reality on the ground is different. Engaging in a war for Iran could leave the Houthis’ home front exposed to government forces backed by regional rivals.
“Expanding the circle of targeting will only result in expanding the circle of confrontation,” the Houthi-affiliated Supreme Political Council warned in a statement that threatened escalation but also implicitly acknowledged the high cost of a wider war.
Perhaps nowhere is the dilemma more acute than in Iraq, where the lines between the state and the “resistance” are dangerously blurred.
Iran-aligned militias, many of which operate under the state-sanctioned Popular Mobilisation Forces, are now caught in a direct standoff with the US. Tensions have simmered since late 2024 when Ibrahim Al-Sumaidaie, an adviser to Iraq’s prime minister, revealed that Washington had threatened to dismantle these groups by force, a warning that led to his resignation under pressure from militia leaders.
Today, that threat looms larger than ever. Unlike Hezbollah or the Houthis, these groups are technically part of the Iraqi security apparatus. A retaliation from Iraqi soil would not just risk a militia war but also a direct conflict between the US and the Iraqi state.
With the IRGC commanders who once mediated these tensions now dead, the “restraining hand” is gone. Isolated militia leaders may now decide to strike US bases of their own accord, dragging Baghdad into a war the government has desperately tried to avoid.
Khamenei’s assassination has essentially shattered the command-and-control structure of the “axis of resistance”.
The network was built on three pillars: the ideological authority of the supreme leader, the logistical coordination of the IRGC and the geographic connection through Syria. Today, all three are broken.
“The most important damage to Iran’s security interests is the severing of the ground link,” Dareini said. With Khamenei gone, the “spiritual link” is also severed.
What remains is a fragmented landscape. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is too exhausted to open a northern front. In Yemen, the Houthis face a potential domestic offensive. In Iraq, militias risk collapsing the state they live in.
When the dust settles in Tehran, the region will face a dangerous unpredictability. The “axis of resistance” is no longer a coordinated army. It is a collection of angry, heavily armed militias, each calculating its own survival in a world where the orders from Tehran have suddenly stopped coming.
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The assassination of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in joint US-Israeli air attacks has caused one of the most significant blows to the country’s leadership since the 1979 Islamic revolution, triggering protests by his supporters.
Khamenei assumed Iran’s supreme leadership in 1989 after the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who had led the Islamic revolution against the pro-United States Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
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On Sunday, Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said seeking revenge for the killing of Khamenei and other senior Iranian officials is the country’s “duty and legitimate right”.
President Donald Trump has framed the operation as a “liberation” moment, predicting that the removal of the “head” will lead to the swift collapse of the body. However, in Iran, the reality suggests a far more complex situation.
Interviews with insiders, military experts and political sociologists suggest that the decapitation of Iran’s top leadership may not go the way the West envisions. Instead, it risks birthing a “garrison state” – a paranoid, militarised system fighting for its existence with no political red lines left to cross.
The central premise of the US operation is that Iran is too brittle to survive the death of its supreme leader. In a phone interview with CBS News, Trump claimed he “knows exactly” who is calling the shots in Tehran, adding that “there are some good candidates” to replace the supreme leader. He did not elaborate on his claims.
However, military analysts warn against the assumption that air strikes alone can trigger “regime change”. Michael Mulroy, a former US deputy assistant secretary of defence, told Al Jazeera Arabic that without “boots on the ground” or a fully armed organic uprising, the state’s deep security apparatus can survive simply by maintaining cohesion.
“You cannot facilitate regime change through air strikes alone,” Mulroy said. “If anyone is left alive to speak, the regime is still there.”
This resilience is rooted in Iran’s dual military structure. The government is protected not just by a regular army (Artesh), but also by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – a powerful parallel military force constitutionally tasked with protecting the velayat-e faqih system – the principle of the guardianship of the Islamic jurist.
Supporting them is the Basij, a vast paramilitary volunteer militia embedded in every neighbourhood, specifically trained to crush internal dissent and mobilise ideological loyalists.
That cohesion is already being tested.
Hossein Royvaran, a political analyst based in Tehran, confirmed that the strikes wiped out the country’s top security tier, including Khamenei’s adviser and secretary of the newly-formed Supreme Defence Council, Ali Shamkhani.
The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, said the leadership transition will begin on Sunday.
“An interim leadership council will soon be formed. The president, the head of the judiciary and a jurist from the Guardian Council will assume responsibility until the election of the next leader,” said Larijani.
“This council will be established as soon as possible. We are working to form it as early as today,” he said in an interview broadcast by state TV.
The rapid formation of an interim leadership council – comprising the president, judiciary chief, and a Guardian Council religious leader – indicates that the system’s “survival protocols” have been activated.
According to Royvaran, the system is designed to be “institutional, not personal”, capable of functioning on “autopilot” even when the political leadership is severed.
But a Tehran-based analyst said direction of Iran is still unclear as officials try to ‘project stability’.
“Officials here are trying to project stability, emphasising that the situation is under control and that state institutions are functioning effectively,” Abas Aslani, senior research fellow at the Center for Middle East Strategic Studies, said.
“Today, [the US-Israeli] air strikes targeted security and military infrastructure in the capital [Tehran] and other cities. There are expectations that such strikes could continue – and possibly intensify – in the coming hours or days,” he told Al Jazeera.
“That prospect of escalation is not something many ordinary Iranians welcome. At the same time, Iranian officials are issuing strong warnings, suggesting they could respond with capabilities that have not previously been used against Israel or the United States.”
Perhaps the most significant shift in the immediate aftermath is Iran’s pivot from religious legitimacy to survivalist nationalism.
Aware that the death of the supreme leader might sever the spiritual bond with parts of the population, surviving officials are reframing the war not as a defence of the clergy, but as a defence of Iran’s territorial integrity.
Larijani, a conservative heavyweight and key figure in the transition, issued a stark warning that Israel’s ultimate goal is the “partition” of Iran. By raising the spectre of Iran being broken into ethnic statelets, the leadership aims to rally secular Iranians and the opposition against a common external enemy.
This strategy complicates the US hope for a popular uprising.
Saleh al-Mutairi, a political sociologist, notes that the government’s declaration of 40 days of mourning creates a “funeral trap” for the opposition. The streets will likely be filled with millions of mourners, creating a human shield for the government and making it logistically and morally difficult for antigovernment protests to gain momentum in the short term.
If Iran survives the initial shock, the nation that emerges will likely be fundamentally different: less calculated and probably more violent.
For years, Khamenei championed a doctrine of “strategic patience”, often absorbing blows to avoid all-out war.
Hassan Ahmadian, a professor at the University of Tehran, says the era died with the supreme leader.
“Iran learned a hard lesson from the June 2025 war: Restraint is interpreted as weakness,” Ahmadian told Al Jazeera Arabic. The new calculus in Tehran is likely to be a “scorched earth” policy.
“The decision has been made. If attacked, Iran will burn everything,” Ahmadian added, suggesting that the response will be broader and more painful than anything seen in previous escalations.”
This risks a scenario where field commanders, freed from the political caution of the clerical leadership, lash out with greater ferocity. The assassination has humiliated the security establishment, exposing what Liqaa Maki, a senior researcher at Al Jazeera Centre for Studies, calls a catastrophic intelligence failure.
“The believer is not bitten from the same hole twice, yet Iran has been bitten twice,” Maki said, referring to the pattern of US strikes. This “total exposure” is likely to drive the surviving leadership underground, turning Iran into a hyper-security state that views any internal dissent as foreign collaboration, he said.
While the “head” of Iran has been removed, the “body” – armed with one of the largest missile arsenals in the Middle East – remains, Maki said.
Supporters of Hezbollah and allied parties carry flags of Hezbollah and a picture of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah (C) during a protest organized by Hezbollah under the slogan “The entire country is resistance” outside the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia headquarters in Beirut, Lebanon, on February 4. Photo by Wael Hamzeh/EPA
BEIRUT, Lebanon, Feb. 28 (UPI) — Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, scheduled for May and widely seen as a new test for the country’s main political players, remain in limbo amid uncertainty over whether they will be held on time or postponed – and whether they will bring about any meaningful change.
While it will be the first election since Iran-backed Hezbollah was significantly weakened during the recent war with Israel, it is unlikely to alter the current balance of power.
Officially, Lebanon says it is ready to proceed on schedule. Most political parties have publicly committed to the vote, with the number of declared candidates for the 128-member parliament rising to 44 as of Friday.
However, as with many other issues in the country, Lebanese are divided over the electoral law and proposed changes concerning expatriate voting and the establishment of mega-centers allowing voters to cast ballots outside their home districts.
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, Hezbollah’s main ally and leader of the Shiite Amal Movement, has refused to bring the proposed amendments put forward by his and Hezbollah’s political opponents to a vote.
The current law is largely inapplicable and requires one or two amendments — specifically, whether to allow or bar Lebanese expatriates from voting in embassies abroad for all 128 parliamentary candidates instead of just six — before it can be fully implemented, according to elections expert Nazih Darwish.
“In any case, it would require a parliamentary vote and cannot be implemented automatically,” Darwish told UPI.
The dispute over diaspora voting essentially revolves around equal political rights and the strategic calculations of political parties aiming to protect or increase their leverage.
Delaying the elections by a few months or postponing them for one or two years has emerged as a likely scenario, with each party trying to safeguard or extend its power.
At the heart of the matter is Hezbollah’s reduced influence, both militarily and politically.
If the delay is purely technical — such as moving the elections from May to July — it would not significantly affect the outcome, with one key exception: More members of the diaspora could participate, as many spend the summer in Lebanon, according to Karim Bitar, a lecturer at Saint Joseph University of Beirut and Sciences Po Paris.
Hezbollah, Bitar said, argues that diaspora voting could tilt the balance against it, as it cannot campaign effectively in many European and Western countries, where it is designated a terrorist organization and large Lebanese expatriate communities reside.
“Hezbollah remains a significant force. Even though it was severely weakened militarily, strong support for Amal and Hezbollah persists among their constituencies,” Bitar told UPI. “Supporters feel they must stick together and continue voting for the two parties to prevent rivals from exploiting their political and military setbacks.”
Although many of Hezbollah’s supporters acknowledge that the group was defeated in the war and should admit it, they still pledged to vote for its candidates.
“That’s because no serious political alternatives have emerged so far for Lebanon’s Shiite community,” David Wood, a senior Lebanon analyst at the International Crisis Group, told UPI.
The challenge is that while Hezbollah retains significant backing, not all Shiites in Lebanon support the group, and the existing Shiite opposition lacks a popular base and relies on backing from other groups.
Darwish argued that the balance of power in the country would remain unchanged as long as Hezbollah — which might lose at most two seats if the elections proceed as scheduled — is not fully disarmed.
“That could change if Hezbollah were to relinquish its weapons completely, but not before four to five years, when a genuine Shiite opposition is likely to emerge and succeed in convincing the Shiite base,” he said.
Postponing the elections would thus benefit the country’s main parties: Hezbollah would maintain its current parliamentary representation, while its opponents could wait for regional developments to shift further against Hezbollah and hasten its full disarmament.
“So, the logic would be that a postponement would actually suit Hezbollah’s opponents, because the group’s situation — both inside Lebanon and in the region — will only get weaker.” Wood noted.
What could accelerate the process is either the conflict between the United States and Iran — Hezbollah’s patron — or a deal affecting Iran’s proxies and regional role.
Other political parties, notably the Christian Lebanese Forces — Hezbollah’s main rival — were gearing up for the elections.
Jade Dimien, the Lebanese Forces deputy secretary-general in charge of elections, said the vote could bring change, provided the Lebanese people want it and are ready to make it happen.
Dimien said this year’s general elections would be shaped by major events of the past three years, including the Israel-Hezbollah war, the election of a new president, the government’s firm stance on Hezbollah’s disarmament and the fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad‘s regime.
“There will be some big changes, but whether they will cause a major shift in the balance of power now, I don’t know,” he told UPI, noting the accelerated developments in the region and fearing “compromises” at the expense of Lebanon.
Separately, campaign financing emerges as another major challenge, with some parties favoring wealthy businessmen who can fund their own campaigns amid limited foreign funding.
While not new in Lebanese parliamentary elections, especially after the 1975-90 civil war, such financing has become increasingly visible today, fueled by the 2019 financial collapse.
“Foreign funding has been reduced … even Iran might not be willing under its current conditions to spend as much money supporting Hezbollah,” Bitar said.
The fear remains that wealthy candidates could buy their way into parliament — by paying for votes or providing clientelist services — thereby boosting the seat count of the most powerful parties.
Bitar warned of an even more alarming issue concerning the redistribution of losses following the collapse of the financial system in 2019.
“Major bank shareholders are trying to sway the vote by electing MPs who could block any IMF deal requiring them to cover their share of the losses,” he said.
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