The presidential stalemate, now in its seventh month, is set to drag on with no solution in sight, despite a flurry of intensified political activity by foreign officials aimed at facilitating the election of a new president.
The gloomy presidential outlook comes as Parliament is scheduled to meet Wednesday in the 16th attempt since April to choose a successor to former President Michel Sleiman, whose six-year tenure ended on May 25.
However, all signs indicate that Wednesday’s Parliament session is destined to fail like previous ones over a lack of quorum, heralding a prolonged presidential vacuum. Thus, Speaker Nabih Berri is expected to postpone the session until after the Christmas and New Year holiday.
Prime Minister Tammam Salam will not attend the Parliament session because he leaves Beirut Wednesday on an official visit to Paris for talks with French President Francois Hollande.
Ahead of the Parliament session, Jean-François Girault, head of the French Foreign Ministry’s Middle East and North Africa department, left Beirut Tuesday after meeting Lebanon’s top leaders and rival politicians to urge them to accelerate the election of a president.
Girault’s visit came a day after Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov ended a two-day trip to Beirut during which he held talks with rival Lebanese leaders on the presidential impasse and the Syrian crisis.
Bogdanov stressed that Moscow supported the election of a consensus president.
In addition to the French and Russian officials, Federica Mogherini, the high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy, arrived in Beirut Tuesday to discuss with Lebanese officials the presidential deadlock, among other things.
However, despite the visits of foreign officials to Beirut, particularly the French envoy, ahead of Wednesday’s Parliament session, no progress has been made in the presidential crisis, a number of lawmakers from various blocs said.
What has been reported by the foreign visitors pertained to the expression of their wishes for the Lebanese to speed up the election of a president in order to preserve stability and the state institutions, the MPs said.
They added that during the foreign officials’ visits, no solutions were suggested over names of candidates and no serious proposals were made to overcome the presidential crisis.
There are reports that the upcoming dialogue between the Future Movement and Hezbollah could be decisive in choosing the next president and that the countries concerned with the presidential impasse, namely the Vatican, Iran and those in Europe, would seek to persuade MP Michel Aoun to withdraw his candidacy in favor of a consensus candidate.
Aoun, the head of the Free Patriotic Movement, cannot face such pressure and he will have to comply with the choice of a consensus candidate in exchange for a consolation prize for his parliamentary bloc, the MPs said.
However, Aoun, who is backed by Hezbollah and March 8 parties for the country’s top Christian post, will not budge from his tough stance on the presidency issue.
On the contrary, he has become more intransigent than before, telling his visitors that even if they threatened him with an “atomic bomb,” he would not back off from his right to the presidency. Aoun argues that each sect chooses its leader and it’s high time for the Christians to pick their leader for the presidency.
Aoun, according to parliamentary sources in the FPM, had restated this stance during his meetings with the Russian and French envoys, and all countries concerned with the presidential issue have been informed through their ambassadors in the region of this stance.
The FPM sources said that the solution to the presidential crisis begins with all political factions putting their demands and problems to Aoun as the next president, so that he can draw up a road map to resolve all outstanding issues, including a new electoral law, a new government and Lebanon’s relations with neighboring countries.
However, political sources said Aoun ignored an irreversible reality when former Prime Minister Saad Hariri was clear in crossing out the four top Maronite leaders (Aoun, Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea, Kataeb Party leader Amine Gemayel and Marada Movement leader MP Sleiman Frangieh) from his presidential calculations. Hariri called in a recent TV interview for the election of a consensus candidate because the March 14 coalition is vetoing Aoun’s candidacy and the Hezbollah-led March 8 alliance is vetoing Geagea’s nomination.
Attempts made by some Christian parties, with the encouragement of the Maronite Church, to bring Aoun and Geagea together to discuss how to face Hariri’s exclusion of the four Maronite leaders have not so far yielded any concrete results, the sources said.
They added that Berri would continue calling for Parliament sessions to elect a president for the foreseeable until conditions were ripe to either convince Aoun to withdraw from the presidency race, or elect a president from outside the names of candidates being floated.
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