The Lebanese Parliament begins a long political battle to elect the next president

The series of bank robberies by Lebanese citizens hoping to recover their own savings, which have been frozen for the past three years, has attracted a lot of foreign media attention in recent weeks and scattered attention on the presidential election, currently underway in Lebanon.

The current president, former General Michel Aoun, who has been in power for six years, ends on October 31. The process to replace him began on September 29 in Parliament, whose 128 deputies have the constitutional power to elect the head of state.

Voting is secret and the President of the Republic will be elected by a two-thirds majority in the first round and by an absolute majority in subsequent rounds.

As expected, the first parliamentary session was not successful. No consensus has yet been reached on who should be Aoun’s successor, due to divisions within the political class.

Parliament is so polarized that it cannot even agree on the need to form a new government, to replace current Prime Minister Najib Mikati, who has been in office since May, when the new parliament’s term began.

A ‘purely formal’ exercise

Most of the 122 votes cast on September 29 were blank, while Michel Moawad, a Maronite deputy and son of former President René Moawad, assassinated in 1989, received 36 votes.

In addition, a vote was issued in memory of Mahsa Amini, the young Iranian woman who died on September 16 in Tehran, after being arrested by the morality police for wearing the veil “improperly”, her death triggered the protest movement in course in Iran.

At the end of this first electoral session, which the French newspaper ‘L’Orient-le-Jour’ described as “a purely formal exercise”, the President of the Parliament, Nabih Berri, adjourned the session, since some parliamentarians had withdrawn from the Chamber, breaking the quorum.

Most likely, the new session scheduled for October 13 will lead to the same result.

The country’s Constitution establishes that if elections are not held within the last ten days of the incumbent’s mandate, Parliament will no longer be able to legislate because it must only hold presidential sessions.

The Lebanese, facing the worst economic crisis in their history, already know that the presidential process can take a long time. Due to the lack of consensus between the different political camps and various consequent blockades, the country remained in an institutional limbo for 29 months, after the term of former President Michel Sleiman ended on May 25, 2014.

Aoun, a political ally of pro-Iranian Hezbollah, was not elected until the 46th electoral session after endless negotiations to achieve a quorum – 86 of the 128 members of Parliament – and officially became president on October 31, 2016.

A position reserved for Maronite Christians

The Taif Agreement, signed in 1989 in Saudi Arabia with the aim of ending the 15-year war in Lebanon, transferred executive power to the Council of Ministers, thus limiting the prerogatives of the president.

For example, although the head of state is designated as commander of the armed forces in defense matters, they remain “subject to the Council of Ministers”, according to the principle of a political model centered on the need to share power between different communities.

Officially, the Lebanese State has 18 communities, the Christians: Maronites, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic Melkites, Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholics, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Coptic Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Armenian Catholic, Latin and Protestant; the Muslims: Shias, Druze, Sunnis, Ismailis and Alawites and a Jewish community.

The National Pact of 1943, the year Lebanon gained independence from France, established how these religious communities should be formally represented in the Lebanese state.

Agreed at the time between the Maronite and Sunni leaders of the country, this unwritten pact stipulates that the president of the republic and the head of the army must always be Maronite Christians, the prime minister a Sunni and the president of Parliament a member of the Shia community. .

Since the Taif Agreement was reached, the 128 seats in Parliament have been shared equally between Muslims and Christians. Within these two confessional blocs, the number of parliamentarians is determined based on the demographic weight of their community -the Shiites have 27 and the Maronites 34-. This was decided in the last census, which was carried out in 1932.

Established to promote consensus, this system has been used over the years by the most important figures in the political class, who have increased the number of political blockades and have erected political negotiation as a way of governing.

During Aoun’s election in 2016, the former general’s camp and his political allies in Hezbollah succeeded in imposing their candidate after long blocking the presidential election. Six years later, this same flock, which lost its majority in the last legislative elections, is trying to get the son-in-law of the outgoing president, former Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, elected. However, he is seen as a divisive figure in Lebanon.

Therefore, a new wave of conflict is likely to emerge and drag on until a candidate can be agreed upon to resolve the current situation. With more than 80% of the population living below the poverty line, according to the NGO Care, the Lebanese now need more than ever for their institutions to function at full capacity.

*Article adapted from its original in French