BEIRUT: Speaker Nabih Berri will likely call for a session to extend Parliament’s mandate next week, now that Christian parties who oppose the extension have indicated their willingness to come to the chamber and attend the vote. The presence of the Free Patriotic Movement, the Kataeb Party and the Lebanese Forces, though they oppose the extension of the mandate, will allow the session to go forward, since it will longer be seen as violating the National Pact, an unwritten arrangement that laid the foundation of Lebanon as a multi-confessional state.
Berri is talking to Christian leaders about extending the legislature’s term, and is expected to schedule a session next week to vote on a two-year-and-seven-month extension.
The speaker told Lebanese Forces MP George Adwan that Parliament risked plunging in vacuum if the extension did not happen.
“You should assume your responsibilities as MPs and as Lebanese Forces. You are presented with the option of vacuum and its repercussions today,” Berri was quoted as having said to Adwan, who visited him Tuesday.
After strongly opposing extension in the previous months, Berri said last week he was convinced it was necessary, after the Future Movement, the representative of the Sunni sect in the country, announced that it wouldn’t take part in parliamentary elections in the midst of a presidential void.
Berri said holding parliamentary polls amid a boycott by the Future Movement would violate the National Pact. He also said that if Parliament’s term expired Nov. 20, and neither extension nor elections had happened, then there would no longer be a legislature to elect a president.
It will not be possible to hold parliamentary elections on time, FPM leader Michel Aoun said Tuesday after meeting Berri.
“There will be no elections, and the Parliament will extend its mandate,” Aoun told reporters as he walked out from the meeting at Berri’s Ain al-Tineh residence.
However, he reiterated his bloc’s objection to the extension.
“Our stand is based on principles,” he said. “Last time we opposed the extension, and so we are doing this time,” he said in reference to his group’s rejection of May 2013’s extension.
Sources in the Christian parties that oppose the extension indicated they might attend the session without voting, guaranteeing its legitimacy in Berri’s eyes and making the renewal of the mandate a fait accompli, since it is supported by other Christian parties and by representatives of Sunnis and Shiites in Parliament.
The sources said that their parties would not boycott the session, particularly if its agenda included important items that had to do with the daily lives of the Lebanese.
Other Christian groups including the Marada Movement, the Tashnag Party along with Metn MP Michel Murr and a number of independent Christian MPs from the March 14 coalition are likely to vote in favor of extension.
Speaking to The Daily Star, a number of March 8 and March 14 MPs said that a Parliament session that convened last week to elect members of Parliament’s Secretariat and parliamentary committees was a prelude to the extension session.
This is because if parliamentary elections were to be held on Nov. 16 as scheduled, there would have been no need to elect new members of the Secretariat and committees.
Berri will convene Parliament Wednesday in a session aimed at electing a new president.
But in the absence of a consensus candidate, the meeting will be an opportunity for further talks between rival factions to agree on the duration of the extension.
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