Beirut: Ahead of the scheduled marathon “National Dialogue” sessions between August 2 and 4, ostensibly to reach a package deal that will include the presidential election, a new electoral legislation and even a new government, the March 14 General Secretariat coordinator Fares Soaid revealed plans to launch a petition that will reject any amendments to Lebanon’s political system.
Soaid declared that the petition was necessary because of lingering doubts about the real intentions of several political components whose ultimate objective was to change the 1943 National Pact as well as the 1989 Taif amended constitution.
He pledged to circulate the petition among Lebanese citizens who will be called to reject any amendments to the Taif Accords that ended the 15-year-long civil war that decimated the country and whose consequences were still visible today. Soaid added that the petition will be ready on August 1 — thus ahead of the 20th National Dialogue — and published in local and international newspapers.
“The petition is a kind of warning to all parties participating in the national dialogue sessions so that none of them demands introducing a change to the political system,” the March 14 official told a local radio station, as fears grew that the ongoing presidential vacuum might necessitate the introduction of constitutional amendments or even holding a new constituent assembly to dramatically change the current political system, which is based on consociationalism that distributed power among the country’s 18 sects.
March 14 tenors blamed Speaker Nabih Berri and Hezbollah for allegedly seeking such a constituent assembly, presumably to favour the Shiite community, although March 8 officials repeated that such was not their aim.
For his part, the Minister of the Interior, Nouhad Al Mashnouq, displayed his usual optimism when he hammered that a new president would be elected before the end of 2016. The highest office in Lebanon has been vacant since May 24, 2014, when Michel Sulaiman ended his six-year term of office. The Hezbollah-led March 8 coalition insisted that a full-scale behind-the-scenes accord must be reached on their anointed candidate, Michel Aoun, before an election could be held.
