BEIRUT: Senior officials from the Future Movement met with former Prime Minister Saad Hariri in the Saudi capital Riyadh Wednesday night for talks centering on the 6-month-old presidential impasse and the launch of an imminent dialogue with Hezbollah.
A Future delegation, including former premier Fouad Siniora, Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk, former MPs Ghattas Khoury and Bassem Sabei and Nader Hariri, chief of Hariri’s staff, arrived in Riyadh on a private plane earlier Wednesday.
The visit comes a day after Hariri met at his residence in Riyadh with Lebanese Forces chief Samir Geagea, who is currently on an official visit to Saudi Arabia. The two leaders stressed the need to speed up the presidential election, defuse political tensions and preserve stability and security in Lebanon.
It also comes amid a flurry of stepped up political activity by French, Russian and European Union officials who visited Beirut last week in an attempt to prod rival Lebanese leaders to end the deadlock that has left Lebanon without a president for more than six months.
LF sources described the results of Geagea’s visit to Riyadh, during which he held talks with senior Saudi officials on the presidential deadlock, as “excellent by all criteria.”
“The visit has achieved its objectives through Geagea’s talks with senior Saudi officials on the Lebanese crisis and its linkage to regional developments,” an LF source told The Daily Star. He said the Saudis extended an “urgent invitation” to Geagea to visit the kingdom to brief them on his assessment of the presidential stalemate.
U.K. Government Minister at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Tobias Ellwood discussed the presidential crisis with Prime Minister Tammam Salam and afterward urged rival Lebanese leaders to engage in dialogue for the election of a new president who can lead Lebanon to confront the “many challenges” facing it.
The foreign officials’ talks in Beirut coincided with increased local and foreign calls for the election of a consensus president as the only way to break the deadlock.
The parliamentary Future bloc has called for expediting the planned dialogue with Hezbollah with the aim of facilitating the presidential vote and defusing Sunni-Shiite tensions stoked by the war in Syria.
Speaker Nabih Berri is still optimistic that the Future-Hezbollah talks would kick-start before the end of the year, according to legislators who met him Wednesday.
Berri was quoted as saying at his weekly meeting with the lawmakers that the “prevailing conditions were positive,” which makes him hopeful about an imminent start of the dialogue between the Future Movement and Hezbollah, whose strained ties have heightened sectarian tensions in the country.
The speaker was also briefed by MP Robert Ghanem on the outcome of deliberations by a parliamentary subcommittee tasked with drafting a new electoral law and the LF’s decision to suspend its participation in the panel.
Berri was quoted by MPs as saying a new president should be elected before any electoral draft law is approved in Parliament. Berri had earlier promised to call for a meeting of Parliament’s general assembly to vote on a raft of draft electoral proposals if the subcommittee failed to reach agreement on a unified proposal by the end of December.
The speaker said he would hold consultations in light of the results of the subcommittee’s deliberations before deciding the next step.
Ghanem, the chairman of the subcommittee representing March 8 and March 14 lawmakers, postponed a meeting of the panel scheduled for Thursday until after the Christmas and New Year’s holiday.
He said the postponement was because the Future-Hezbollah dialogue would take place between Christmas and New Year, “which might clear the way to priorities of the presidency and an electoral law.” “There are two priorities: The election of a president and the approval of a law for parliamentary elections. Institutions must continue their work,” Ghanem told reporters after meeting Berri at Ain al-Tineh.
“These two priorities are essential to restoring life to institutions. When you have a body without a head, institutions cannot function,” he added.
Ghanem, who also heads Parliament’s Administration and Justice Committee, quoted Berri as saying that if a president was elected, MPs would immediately approve an electoral law based on proportional representation.
He said that despite the LF decision to suspend its participation, the subcommittee would continue its work.
Asked to comment regarding the Christian absence from the subcommittee following the LF’s boycott and objections by the Free Patriotic Movement and the Kataeb Party over the distribution of electoral districts, Ghanem said: “Everyone is participating in discussions. The work of institutions should not be disrupted. Proportional [representation] is contained in the Taif Accord.”
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