Riyadh: Although former speaker Hussain Hussaini pleaded with political elites to put their political differences aside and elect a head of state for a one-year term, the recommendations by one of the proponents of the Taif Accords fell on deaf ears, even as Lebanon continued to hopelessly wallow in its presidential void. Now there is a call to double the proposed term.
According to the Saudi Okaz daily, two unnamed but presumably leading political parties – believed to be Future and the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) – held serious conversations that called for the election of the FPM’s Michel Aoun “for a two-year period”, although this is not a new idea.
In mid-2014, just a few weeks after Michel Sulaiman ended his six-year term in office, the pro-Hezbollah Al Akhbar had reported that Lebanese officials in Paris, presumably from the anti-Syria Future party, had tabled an identical proposal in exchange for being allowed to form the next cabinet.
The deal would allow Aoun to appoint his son-in-law, General Chamel Roukoz, head of the army. Roukoz retired from the army several months ago.
Then as now, such a proposal requires a constitutional amendment and entails reaching an agreement over a new parliamentary electoral law that would presumably not harm the representation of the current leaders and protect their feudal fiefdoms.
Since Sulaiman ended his presidential term in May 2014, Hezbollah and most of its March 8 allies cast blank votes in the first of 39 sessions to date and boycotted the following 38 scheduled gatherings.
Without a two-thirds quorum, parliament sessions led to bickering, as Iran-backed Hezbollah insisted that it would only participate if it received solid guarantees that its candidate, Aoun, would be elected.
In a surprise move on January 18 this year, anti-Syrian Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea, also a presidential candidate, publicly backed Aoun.
Aoun now faces two opponents: Marada movement chief Sulaiman Franjieh, who is also a March 8 candidate and was selected by the Future party’s Sa’ad Hariri as an alternative, and Henri Helou, a Progressive Socialist Party candidate.
While Franjieh came to the forefront in the presidential polls late last year, his nomination created insurmountable hurdles on account of his pro-Syrian policies, and Helou is little more than a blocking candidate to prevent anyone from reaching the required two-thirds without PSP leader Walid Junblatt’s blessings.
For now, the election of a president either for a single or two-year term is unlikely to occur because the elites fear the adoption of a new electoral law and, equally important, because Hezbollah does not want to fill the post.