Oct. 16 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Lebanese party-militia Hezbollah has demanded this Sunday that the Lebanese political forces appoint a president who recognizes the role of the “resistance” against Israel in the new voting session that Parliament will hold next Thursday to try to elect a new head of state, after two failed attempts and two weeks before the current president, Michel Aoun, expires.
“We need a president who works in the interest of the country and who has courage. Not someone who obeys the orders of the Americans, but the interests of the nation,” the leader of the Hezbollah parliamentary bloc, Mohamed Raad, has made known in a speech collected by ‘L’Orient le Jour’.
Although Hezbollah and its allies are betting on a consensus president, other formations such as the Lebanese Forces (FL) led by the Christian Samir Geagea, on the contrary, ask for a president who faces the Shiite militia-party.
“No one wants a defiant president, what we want is a president who can launch the necessary rescue operation, given the state Lebanon has fallen into,” he told the official Lebanese news agency ANI.
The president of the Lebanese Parliament, Nabih Berri, postponed this week the second session on the election of the new president of the country and summoned the political forces to a new round on October 20 after only 71 of the 128 parliamentarians have attended the session, well below the 86 needed to proceed to the vote.
The Lebanese Constitution does not mention that the position is reserved for a specific confessional group, although a consensus established in 1943 established that the president should be Christian, the prime minister should be Sunni and the president of Parliament should be Shia, a distribution that has been respected since then.
The country is mired in a serious political, economic and social crisis aggravated by the war in Syria, the coronavirus pandemic and the explosions registered on August 4, 2020 in the port of the capital, Beirut, which left more than 220 dead. and enormous material damage.
