French, Russian, British and European Union officials who visited Lebanon recently as part of stepped-up political activity to help break the 6-month-old presidential deadlock have agreed on the need to elect a consensus president, diplomatic sources said.
An agreement to elect a consensus candidate will exclude the four top Maronite leaders from the presidency race, the sources said, clearly referring to Free Patriotic Movement leader MP Michel Aoun, Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea, Kataeb Party leader Amine Gemayel, and Marada Movement head MP Sleiman Frangieh.
Geagea is the March 14-backed presidential candidate, while Aoun is supported by Hezbollah and its March 8 allies for the country’s top Christian post.
Following a two-day visit to Beirut earlier this month by Jean-François Girault, chief of the French Foreign Ministry’s Middle East and North Africa Department, as part of a French presidential initiative in coordination with the United States and the Vatican, final touches are being put to a plan to set the presidential election process into motion, the sources said.
Girault, who held talks with Lebanon’s top leaders and rival politicians on the presidential crisis, had said France was ready to facilitate an agreement on the election of a successor to former President Michel Sleiman, whose six-year term ended on May 25.
According to the sources, some Western officials have become convinced of the need to reduce the list of presidential candidates to three, while the search goes on for the role required from the next president and whether he should be a politician, a security man or an economist.
Western countries prefer the next Lebanese president to be a mixture of the three characters in view of the political, security, military and socioeconomic burdens endured by Lebanon as a result of regional conflicts, particularly the war in Syria, said the sources, which are closely linked to Lebanese political leaders.
They added that developments surrounding the presidential crisis are taking a positive trend as reflected by the calm atmosphere internally with the imminent launch of the planned dialogue between the Future Movement and Hezbollah, or the expected meeting between Geagea and Aoun.
The main topics of these inter-Muslim and inter-Christian meetings will focus on confronting the threat of terrorism and takfiri factions coming from Lebanon’s eastern border with Syria and protecting the internal situation by quickly ending the presidential vacuum to gear efforts toward facing the political, security and administrative challenges, the sources said.
Referring to the visits of Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov and Girault to Beirut, the sources said the Russian envoy’s trip was aimed at laying the foundation for a solution to the Syrian conflict by trying to persuade the internal and external opposition groups, excluding the takfiri factions, to work together and close ranks in order to engage later in a dialogue with the Syrian regime in a conference to be held either in Geneva or in Moscow.
But Girault’s trip, which was coordinated with Washington and the Vatican, was based on three factors: The historic distinctive Lebanese-French relations; France’s regional role by virtue of its balanced ties with various countries, particularly Saudi Arabia and Iran, and in Lebanon, Paris stands at the same distance with March 8 and March 14 parties; and France’s experience in sponsoring Lebanese compromise solutions in coordination with the Vatican, the sources said.
On this basis, France, fearing that the Christians might lose their role and weight in the country’s national political setup, is seeking to eliminate internal and external hurdles blocking the presidential election and is helping to outline the president’s qualifications without entering into the game of names, they added.
In outlining the president’s qualifications, the diplomatic sources said any head of state should adopt economic measures and political reforms that would help in Lebanon’s recovery.
Noting that Lebanon has a strong economy founded on a private initiative and hard currency sent home by Lebanese expatriates, the sources said that what is required is a fair distribution of this wealth through balanced development in all areas.
The balanced development should be accompanied by a political, reformist and administrative transparency to be translated by the election of a president who has wide and deep knowledge of the region’s history and peoples on the basis that Lebanon is not an island isolated from its environment, the sources added.
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