BEIRUT: In the absence of an accord between the rival factions on a consensus candidate to break the four-month-long presidential deadlock, a parliamentary session set for Tuesday to elect a president is doomed to fail, like previous ones, over a lack of quorum, political sources said.
There have been 11 sessions in the past five months that were aborted because of the lack of a quorum, raising fears of a prolonged vacancy in the country’s top Christian post.
Lawmakers from MP Michel Aoun’s parliamentary Change and Reform bloc, Hezbollah’s bloc and its March 8 allies have thwarted a quorum since April by consistently boycotting parliamentary sessions, demanding an agreement beforehand with their March 14 rivals over a consensus candidate.
The failure to pick a successor to former President Michel Sleiman, whose six-year tenure came to an end May 25, has plunged the country into a presidential impasse that has paralyzed Parliament and is threatening to cripple much of the work of the government.
A number of MPs said that Speaker Nabih Berri’s repeated calls for parliamentary sessions to elect a president despite his previous knowledge that they were destined to fail came in response to Maronite Patriarch Beshara Rai’s demands that the speaker keep on inviting the lawmakers to meet and choose a successor to Sleiman.
In the view of some Lebanese politicians, the presidential election is no longer linked to external developments, like the war in Syria or the outcome of the negotiations between Western states and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program.
The various political blocs’ stances on the presidential election have not changed, despite the March 14 coalition’s initiative earlier this month to break the deadlock that has left Lebanon without a president for nearly four months.
The March 14 coalition offered to hold talks with the Hezbollah-led March 8 parties to reach agreement on a consensus candidate.
However, this was quickly dismissed by Aoun’s bloc as an “old and meaningless initiative,” while Berri said it offered nothing new.
During his recent meeting with Hezbollah’s leader Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah, Aoun, who is the March 8 bloc’s preferred candidate for the presidency, received strong support.
The March 14 parties are against him as a candidate and accuse him of acting under the motto: “It’s me or no one else.”
Following his meeting with Nasrallah, Aoun’s visitors quoted him as saying that he was not in a hurry to hold a presidential election that would not achieve a real partnership for the Christians in government.
Aoun, according to visitors, considers that the prolonged presidential vacuum could eventually serve the Christians if it leads to a president who truly represents them, the sources said.
If this does not happen, Aoun considers that the current political system might have to be reconsidered, the sources said.
However, parliamentary sources in the March 8 camp see in the developments in Yemen and the quick rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, which led to a political solution in Sanaa, as “a good beginning” that could reflect positively on the presidential election in Lebanon.
The sources say that in the same way that pressure was applied on former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to step down, Hezbollah could try to convince Aoun to stand aside.
“This is the most likely possibility because it will be difficult for Tehran to convince Saudi Arabia to back Aoun’s candidacy for the presidency,” the sources said.
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