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Lebanese President Michel Aoun, who is preparing to leave the presidential palace on Sunday, a day before the end of his term, warned that the country would slide into “constitutional chaos” due to the impossibility of electing a new president to succeed him. The political blocs were unable to reach a consensus on a candidate to succeed Aoun. The office of president has been vacant in Lebanon many times in the past, but the country is now on the brink of an unprecedented situation with an impending vacancy and a provisional government with limited powers.
One day before leaving the presidential palace, the president warned Lebanese Michel Aoun told Reuters on Saturday that his country could slide into “constitutional chaos” due to the inability toElection of a new president As his successor, and under a provisional government, he accuses himself of not having full powers.
Aoun is expected to leave the presidential palace in Baabda tomorrow, Sunday, a day before the end of his six-year term, but four election sessions have not led to the election of a president, in light of the unprecedented division of parliament after the elections of May, as political blocs failed to reach consensus on a candidate to succeed Aoun.
The office of president has been vacant many times in the past, but Lebanon now finds itself on the brink of an unprecedented situation, where the presidency is vacant and the interim government has only limited powers.
Aoun hinted that he was still considering an unspecified political move in the final hours of his mandate to address the constitutional crisis, but told Reuters there is “no final decision” on what the move might entail.
In response to a question, he said: “Yes, it is reasonable for constitutional chaos to occur. The void does not fill the void.”
Aoun and the ghost of the civil war
In the minds of many Lebanese, Aoun’s presidency is closely linked to their country’s worst days since the civil war that raged between 1975 and 1990, in light of the financial crisis that began in 2019 and the explosion in the port of Beirut, which caused deaths in 2020.
Gebran Bassil, Aoun’s son-in-law, is reported to have ambitions for the presidency. The United States included Bassil on the 2020 sanctions list for corruption, but he denies it. Aoun said on Saturday that the sanctions would not prevent Bassil from running for president.
“He certainly has the right to run for president,” he added. Speaking of US sanctions and whether they prevent Bassil from running for president, Aoun said: “We will cancel them as soon as he is elected.”
Diplomatic breakthrough with Israel
In his last week in office, Aoun signed an American-mediated deal to delimit Lebanon’s southern maritime border with Israel, representing a diplomatic breakthrough that would allow both sides to extract gas from offshore fields.
He said the powerful Iranian-backed group Hezbollah, which sent drones over Israel and threatened multiple times to attack offshore drilling platforms, was a “deterrent” to continuing negotiations in favor of Lebanon.
He added that “the initiative taken by Hezbollah was not coordinated (with the state), but it was useful”. “We would not have accepted that we were not allowed to extract oil and gas from our waters. In this case, we would not have allowed Israel to extract gas,” Aoun said.
Aoun pointed out that the deal has paved the way for gas discoveries that could be Lebanon’s “last chance” to recover from the three-year financial meltdown, which cost the currency 95% of its value and pushed 80% of the population in poverty.
FRANCE 24 / Reuters
