Political posters on prominent display in Tripoli’s old city area ahead of the May 6 election.

May 6 marked Lebanon’s first parliamentary election in nine years, an occasion that was greeted with hope, trepidation, and — in many cases — a resounding yawn. I wrote before the election on the hopes and fears of the new generation of voters who would have their first chance to cast ballots.

On Election Day, I decided to head to the city of Tripoli in northern Lebanon. The city’s Sunni-majority population has been a traditional bastion of support for Prime Minister Saad al Hariri, whose Future Movement was widely expected to lose seats in this election. In Tripoli, the party was facing several strong challengers, including from lists formed by former Hariri ally and former general Ashraf Rifi, who had criticized the prime minister as making concessions to Hezbollah; from former Prime Minister and wealthy businessman Najib Mikati; and from Faisal Karami, son of former Prime Minister Omar Karami and former minister of youth and sports, among others.

Preliminary results on election night showed Rifi’s list losing out, taking no seats, while Future was expected to take five, Mikati’s list four, and Karami’s list at least two.

Given the stakes and Tripoli’s history as a periodic site of conflagrations, I had expected to feel some tension on the streets on Election Day, but the atmosphere was sleepy and mildly festive. Workers for the various campaigns sat on plastic chairs in the street, chatting, drinking coffee and sometimes smoking argileh, amid the soldiers guarding the polls.

The voters I spoke with, for the most part, had similar complaints about the current situation: the daily electricity cuts, undrinkable public water supply, and lack of jobs for the youth — or for anyone, really — the feeling that no one much cared about this, Lebanon’s second-largest city. And although each had his or her preferred candidate, few expressed much hope that conditions would change.

“Lebanon is the most miserable country in the world. These are not leaders — they’re dogs,” said Bilal Amouri, the proprietor of a shop near the center of the city selling manoush and breakfast pastries. He ticked off a list of grievances, chief among them the failing electric grid and high cost of medical care. “In Syria, they’ve had eight years of war and they have electricity, and if you go to the hospital it’s much cheaper.”

“We only love one person and believe in him,” he concluded. “That is Saad al Hariri.”

Amouri’s loyalty to the younger Hariri, he said, was for the sake of the prime minister’s father, assassinated former Prime Minister Rafic al Hariri. Others I spoke to had chosen their preferred candidates based on personal relationships and family loyalties.

“Deep inside you feel like you don’t want to vote for anyone, but I am with someone,” said Yasmine al Bab, a mother of three and chef at the Islamic Hospital, who voted for Karami. “He’s better than the others. My family is all with him, and we’re not going to change.”

Elie Attieh, who was working for the Mikati list distributing food and bringing voters to the polls, told me, “We’re talking about who is the best one. If you could take them all and throw them out and start over it would be very good. But who is the best? There isn’t one better than Najib Mikati. He doesn’t discriminate between Muslims and Christians, and he’s the one who works most in Tripoli. The rest come only during the elections.”

Posters of Ashraf Rifi plastered on a wall in Tripoli ahead of the May 6 election.

Hilal Homsi, wearing a Future Movement shirt proclaiming “Soutak huwwe al kharza al zirqa yelli bithemi Libnan” — “Your vote is the evil eye charm that protects Lebanon” — pressed a sandwich and can of coke on me over my protests. Homsi had spent election day driving voters to the polls for the Future list, but said he had voted for Rifi, with whom he had served in the Lebanese army.

“I worked for them, but I love Ashraf Rifi,” he said, explaining that he would have worked for Rifi’s campaign if they had paid.

It was clear from the number of campaign workers on the streets that the parties were providing a good chunk of the population with employment at least for the day. Several people told me they were providing more than that and the practice of vote-buying is widespread, with some voters waiting until the end of the day to cast their ballot for whoever comes with the highest offer.

“They told me, four different offices — each one said if you come, you will be paid more. The least one was $200 and the most was $700,” said Aya Nabil Sebai, 25, who works in her family’s DVD store (a dying form of business in much of the world, which stays alive in Lebanon thanks to the notoriously slow internet). One of her aunts had returned from Germany on a political party’s dime to cast her vote, Nabil Sebai added.

Al Bab and Homsi also said they’d been approached by campaigns looking to buy votes.

“All of them offered us money,” al Bab said.“Most of the people are waiting, because as time goes on, the amount becomes more. At the end of the voting time, at 6:30 or 7, it will become $1,000.”

But she said, “We don’t want people like this, someone who pays money. We want a leader to open factories, to give job opportunities to the youth. They’re doing that now, before the election, but after the election, they won’t.”

I also heard gripes from both voters and candidates about the new, semi-proportional voting system, which requires voters to pick both a list of candidates and a preferred candidate from the list. Several said they would have preferred to pick candidates from more than one list.

Nehme Mahfoud, a candidate with the Future list, told me he would have preferred to run as an independent candidate, but joined Hariri’s list after he was unable to to run with the civil society slate.

“I had two choices, either don’t do anything and sit in the house or go with Hariri,” he said. “If the law allowed me, I would have run alone. I came to this list because there wasn’t another choice.”

The only person I encountered in Tripoli during the course of the day who had voted for the new “civil society” list was my friend and sometimes translator, Walid Chakich.

Chakich, 24, said he can’t vouch for the new candidates, but hoped they would turn out to be different from the old.

“I don’t know anything about them, but they are new,” he said. “I don’t want to see the old leaders corrupting the country again and again.”

At best, most of the people I talked to hoped there might be some small change in circumstances as a result of the election. But, if nothing else, most were happy that at long last there had been an election, and that it had passed without major incident. Sometimes small favors are the best you can get.