The Presidential Race in Lebanon: Confrontation Between Azour and Franjieh and the Search for a Solution

Tony Gibran wrote in Markazia:

Whatever form was agreed upon between the opposition parties and sects and the leadership of the Free Patriotic Movement, and it was taken out in order to announce its support for the former minister, Jihad Azour, as a presidential candidate, none of the observers can deny the new form and content of the upcoming confrontation between Azour and the candidate of the Shiite duo, the head of the Marada Movement, Suleiman Franjieh in The third candidate remains missing as of this writing.

Accordingly, political and diplomatic sources following Al-Markaziya say that such developments put an end to one stage of the presidential race and opened up horizons for a completely different one. Most of the international community’s wishes – if we go back to the stances of the group of ambassadors representing the five countries who met in Paris on the sixth of last February – have been fulfilled in form. They were unanimous in the series of initiatives led by the Saudis and Qataris, in addition to the French initiative led by President Emmanuel Macron personally, and with them a group of Arab, Western and Gulf governments and officials in particular, who issued calls to the Lebanese in order to run the presidential elections with absolute seriousness.

This requires resorting to and resorting to the legislative authority represented by the Representative Council, so that whoever plays the role of the source of all constitutional authorities has his say in generating the head of the state in a democratic manner that does not amount to any legal or constitutional doubt. It is also in order to regulate the relationship between the constitutional institutions after the completion of their contract. And all of this is happening after the caretaker government, along with the parliament, proved their inability to do what is required of them, due to the former’s lack of constitutional legitimacy as long as it is still a “caretaker government” and was unable to manage the country’s affairs and institutions at most levels, as it did not gain the parliament’s confidence. The new one born a year ago, and the prolonged failure expressed by the second prevented the election of the future president of the republic before undertaking any other legislative task, as the constitution says. The stage of vacancy of the presidency has entered its occupants in the first days of its eighth month, no matter how sterile the discussion about this task is.

And to this observation that no one can ignore, Azour’s candidacy has seriously and definitively fulfilled – if its chapters are completed in the coming hours – a requirement and a basic condition set by Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, who holds the key to the House of Representatives, in order to invite Parliament to the twelfth session to elect the president when two candidates are available. At least two newcomers to run for the Baabda Palace, which he pledged to the French initiative, the Saudi and Qatari movement, and to various international and regional bodies, and he cannot easily back down from his pledge, as some believe, who threaten not to call if the opposition guarantees the fate of its candidate.

And there remains a knot that must be searched for the possibility of doing it, and it is related to disabling the legal quorum whenever the parliamentary composition prevented any of the candidates from obtaining two-thirds of the members of the House of Representatives from the first session, to raise the issue of the successive sessions that must be followed in order to elect the president by half plus one, which is something It will open horizons for talking about a legal quorum, which is not guaranteed for the two parties to the conflict. They had previously threatened to expel him if one of them felt the need to prevent the election of the other candidate.

When talking about this dilemma, political references indicate the importance of talking about the expected penalties for any of the perpetrators of this step. Many have previously suspected that the guarantees provided by Berri to call for an election session did not also include his pledge to return to the possibility of returning to the series of quorum blowing, which is the method he resorted to in the past 11 sessions with his partner in the duo, as they and allies from another bloc were using papers. Eggs before the quorum is blown, which the opposition can resort to if it fears that Franjieh will get half plus one.

To get out of this negative equation and the impasse it could pose, the diplomatic references calling for the election of the president as soon as possible hope that the parliament will remain governed by what is called “constructive ambiguity”, which calls for anticipation of the possibility that there will be one or two parliamentary groups that are able to play The role of the “grabber’s egg”, who are among the deputies who are hesitant between voting for this or that candidate, are ready to decide in the last moments to separate them and secure the victory of either of them without this being guaranteed before the call and the opening of the series of electoral cycles following the first session.

At this point, the research focuses on finding out the position of the “Democratic Gathering” deputies and the “National Moderation Bloc” deputies, along with a group of separate deputies, including independents and changeists, who are still hesitating between Franjieh and Azour. This contributes to the recalculation of the votes of the two candidates together. It is proven that among those who do not want to elect Franjieh at all are those who are prevented from electing Azour after considering the second from the list of “challenging candidates”, and therefore he is now in the same category in which they put Franjieh as well. Which will inevitably end in the inability of either of them to win even half plus one, no matter how many electoral cycles.

Here, the references do not ignore what President Nabih Berri’s visitors admitted that he was the one who predicted such a final scenario, being certain that what happened would lead him to his negative expectation without the ability to draw a “simulation” of what the next stage will witness, unless this atmosphere causes more violence. Cramping and tending the country to where many do not want. And that among them were those who faced the “Shia binary” that expressed the intention to challenge the opposition majority and its Christian majority in an unprecedented and public way, just because the Free Patriotic Movement joined the ranks of the Christian opposition, along with a Druze majority and a remarkable Sunni percentage.

In conclusion, the political references state that they are still thinking and wondering about the reasons that prompted the Shiite duo to nominate Franjieh in the manner that has been accomplished to date, and the accompanying positions that increased the rate of national and sectarian tensions at the country level. In addition to her insistence on monopolizing the “classification” of the “challenging” candidates, she practiced it in a way that does not rise to any doubt, which led some to suspect that she wanted to see Franjieh in Baabda Palace. What made things worse is that, in light of her call for an internal Lebanese-Lebanese cooking, she does not hesitate to translate her position as a reflection of the progress of the axis of resistance in the region in an open manner that cancels any attempt to contest the merit in light of the “constructive ambiguity” apart from the requirements of the Saudi-Iranian understanding for the purpose of Keeping Lebanon outside the circle of the “zero crises” project in the region. Which will inevitably lead to the most expected negative scenarios, and the events of the coming days will prove this theory with the difficulty of denying it.