Photo Credit: The Daily Star/Mohammad Azakir
For the 43rd consecutive presidential election session, Lebanon’s Parliament failed to select a new president. To hold a vote, 86 MP’s of the 128-member legislature are required, but only 20 MP’s arrived for the session. Speaker Nabih Berri, who leads the Amal Movement, postponed the next session to September 7. The country has been without a president for over two years, and Lebanon’s competing blocs, the March 8 and March 14 alliances, have shown little progress toward a compromise. Michel Aoun, who leads the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), and Sleiman Frangieh, who leads the Marada Movement, are the current leading candidates. Both of these parties are members of the March 8 alliance, but Frangieh was nominated by the March 14 alliance. Auon is supported by Hezbollah, FPM, and other March 8 allies, who have repeatedly boycotted the electoral sessions. Frangieh is supported by the Future Movement, the Amal Movement, and the Progressive Socialist Party.
In response to Lebanon’s failure to choose a new president, the UN Security Council urged Lebanese leaders to “put Lebanon’s stability and national interests ahead of partisan politics.” In a statement, the Council stressed that “the election of a President, the formation of a unity Government, and the election of a Parliament by May 2017 are critical for Lebanon’s stability and resilience to withstand regional challenges,” and expressed a “deep concern at the Parliament’s repeated inability to form a quorum and elect a President.” The international body also underlined that “the [presidential] vacancy and the resulting political paralysis seriously impair Lebanon’s ability to address the growing security, economic, social and humanitarian challenges facing the country.”
Analysis from Stratfor blamed Lebanon’s stalemate on Hezbollah’s refusal to support any candidate that may impede “the organization in realizing its strategic objectives.” It argues that “until Hezbollah views the Lebanese political stalemate as a threat to its own goals, the group will continue to block consensus candidates in order to increase its leverage within the negotiating process.” Last year, analyst Emile Hokayem argued that the political impasse “is satisfactory to a lot of political parties in Lebanon.” Hokayem claimed that it may be better for Lebanon to move forward without picking a new president, insisting that ending the practice of selecting presidents might halt “some of the competition, nastiness, and some of the brinkmanship in the country’s politics.”