Hezbollah towards restoring the initiative?

The demonstration is not merely a farewell to an influential personality, but rather a station for restoration of prestige and confirmation of sites, and a stage between the confusing party and the party that regains the initiative.

First, the great popular crowd expected in the funeral reflects the party’s restoration of its internal balance after a period of the political and security challenges that it has gone through, especially in the wake of regional developments and the pressures that ravaged Lebanon. The intense presence will be a clear indication that the party is still able to mobilize its rules, and that its popular legitimacy has not been shaken, which restores it to the role of “unimaginable power” in the Lebanese equation, whether at the level of the street or in the corridors of power. This crowd will serve as a new pressure card in which the party will restore its accounts with its opponents, and it is reminded that it maintains a ability to resolve balances if necessary.

Second, the exact organization of the event, which is sponsored by the logistical and security party units, highlights the return of the leadership structure to its previous era of rigor and discipline. The ability to manage a crowd of this size, in light of the complex security and political situations, indicates that the organizational structure of the party has not been broken, and may even be strengthened after bitter experiences that the party went through. This will enhance the confidence of the mass base and fighters that the “organizational machine” is still efficiently, which reflects positively on the party’s cohesion in facing the upcoming challenges.

Financially, the large sums of the event show that talking about a fierce financial crisis within the party may be exaggerated, or that the party has managed to compensate for the deficiency through the regional support network that links it to its allies. The ability to finance effectiveness of this size, with the accompanying media and security preparations, indicates that the party maintains an important part of its resources, or that its allies are ready to pump additional money to support the “power” scene that he wants to provide, especially at a stage where the region witnesses transformations It affects the roles of its actors.

On the regional level, the party will seek through this funeral to prove that it still maintains a popular and organizational extension that goes beyond the Lebanese borders, even if its direct field presence declines in countries such as Iraq or Yemen. The expected presence of delegations or symbols from these countries, whether publicly or not announced, will be an affirmation that the party is able to activate its network of relations when needed, and that it is still an influential player in the regional equation, and that sometimes indirectly. This point is extremely important in light of the competition of regional powers to fill the voids, and the party’s desire to prove that it was not excluded from the scene.

Finally, the event will give the party new legitimacy, which enables it to maneuver in the fragmented Lebanese interior. This legitimacy may be translated later into political or even military moves, such as activating the confrontation discourse with Israel or pressure on local opponents. The funeral, in this sense, is not an end point, but rather the beginning of a stage in which the party tries to recycle its tools to remain a party that does not lose sight of equations that are more complicated day by day.