First-time voters

Outside a school in Ibl al-Saqi, a town in the Marjayoun district in southern Lebanon, three youth voted for oppositional candidates.

Elias Assi, Roy Bshara and Tareq Laqees grew up in the same village, and voted for the first time this election.

“This small group of ours is an initiative that will hopefully be able to penetrate the system, even if it is just one MP, to just show that the south is afflicted but can start to make noise,” Tareq, 26, told AJ Naddaff.

“If you compare us to our parent’s generation, their generation lived through 15 years of civil war, so in a way it shaped their beliefs to follow these political parties. Not all of them though, some people are starting to change that but at a much slower pace than our own generation,” says Roy Bshara, 24.