[Part I]

Electoral laws should always be viewed with a pessimistic point of view. In the 1950s, we thought we had a modern electoral law (Women were eligible to vote for the first time), yet we went for a civil strife in 1958, which was partly caused by the fact that the gerrymandered districts threw major Muslim leaders outside the parliament. In the 1960s, the law was also considered to be a major breakthrough. The numbers of MPs was higher than ever, the administrative cazas became electoral constituencies, and creating relatively bigger constituencies with significant multi-sectarian representation was a huge achievement that was supposed to weaken sectarianism by making it harder for a sectarian MP to make it in mixed districts, and easier for a cross-sectarian candidate to make it by getting a significant number of votes from each sectarian group. (more…)