a divided Parliament, forced to agree on the President of the Republic

With much delay, the first vote was held yesterday to choose Aoun’s successor. A step that has created divisions (over Hezbollah) and pushed the President of the House to force the hand to reach an agreement. The country could come to a standstill if there is a double vacancy in power, with no head of government and no president. pressure from the international community.

Beirut () – “If they want this Parliament, and also Lebanon, to continue to exist, they must come to an understanding!” With these words, the president of the House, the Shiite Nabih Berry, concluded yesterday’s vote to elect a new president of the Republic, called to succeed Michel Aoun, whose term expires on October 31. Berry added that his intention is to set the date of the next vote based on progress in reaching an agreement between the parties.

Parliament was convened at a very late date, at the end of the first of the two months (September and October) stipulated by the Constitution. He failed to elect a new head of state in the first round of voting. The failure was to be expected: the House is divided into two parties, around the question of arms to Hezbollah, a long-standing source of confrontation. Neither side has an absolute majority of the votes (half plus one, that is, 65). And much less with two thirds of the seats, the number necessary to elect a candidate in the first round (86 votes).

In the vote, 122 of the 128 deputies that make up the Chamber gave their present (there were six absent). Of these, 63 voted blank: those from the Shia tandem (Amal and Hezbollah), Gebran Bassil’s CPL and some independents and their allies. On the other hand, the sovereignist front hostile to Hezbollah (whose nucleus is made up of the Lebanese Forces, the Kataëb party and Walid Joumblatt’s Druze bloc) voted in favor of Michel Moawad, the son of the former president (René Moawad, assassinated in 1989 ), which received 36 votes. Without giving explanations, the deputies of the “response” (representing the protest movement of October 2019) changed course and voted for Sélim Eddé (13 votes), a brilliant businessman who, however, is not a candidate, since his candidacy was rejected by the jurist and former deputy Salah Honein.

On the Sunni side, division has reigned since its leader, Saad Hariri, withdrew from political life at the beginning of the year. Yesterday, at the last moment, the front managed to form a group of a dozen deputies who only wrote one word on their ballots: Lebanon.

In the field of the “blank vote”, the Shiite deputies who were in principle in favor of the candidacy of the leader of the north, Sleiman Frangié, could not express their preference in his favor without being abandoned to their fate by Bassil, the president of the CPL and rival of Frangié. Without strong representatives of the Sunni and Druze communities, this side cannot hope to elect a head of state thanks to an “agreement”. The same reasoning applies to the pro-sovereignty camp, which lacks influential figures from the Sunni and Shia communities. As Berry points out, both sides are doomed to go ahead and come to an understanding, because each has the weapon of the quorum to prevent the other from winning the election and choosing their own candidate.

This “first vote” has convinced the deputies present of the absolute need for a rapprochement between the parties, given the danger of being left without a President of the Republic for months, when Aoun’s mandate expires at the end of October. It would be to repeat the same scenario of 2016, when the country of the cedars was left without a head of state for more than two years.

And this agreement is more necessary than ever because the impasse political in the formation of a new government is also due to a deep disagreement between current President Aoun and resigning Prime Minister Nagib Mikati. Article 75 of the Constitution stipulates that, in the event of a presidential vacancy, the prerogatives of the head of state are provisionally assumed by the Council of Ministers. However, Aoun refuses to cede his prerogatives to a resigning government and threatens not to leave the presidential palace if a new government favorable to the political group to which he belongs is not formed.

Faced with the destructive prospect of a double power vacuum in Lebanon – governmental and presidential – France, Saudi Arabia and the United States issued a joint statement last week. In it, they urge the deputies to “elect a president who can unite the Lebanese people.” This unity is all the more essential as the country is going through an economic crisis, plagued by suffering and social tensions. The International Monetary Fund has conditioned an aid of some 3,000 million euros to the carrying out of reforms related to the proper functioning of the institutions.