A number of continues Lebanese representatives Their sit-in from inside the parliament’s plenary hall, to protest the disruption of the presidential elections and the failure to call for open sessions, after Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri adjourned the election session, today, Thursday.
Pictures of the sit-in deputies were spread on social media while they were sitting in the dark in the parliament building and using their mobile phone lights, due to the power outage.
Representatives Melhem Khalaf, Najat Saliba, Cynthia Zarazir, Firas Hamdan, Osama Saad, Abdul Rahman Al-Bizri, Salim Al-Sayegh, Adeeb Abdel-Masih, Elias Jarada, Paula Yacoubian and Walid Al-Baarini announced their participation in the sit-in.
The vicinity of the parliament also witnessed a popular movement to support the parliamentarians who were sitting in the parliament.
Failed for the 11th time
It is noteworthy that the Lebanese Parliament failed, for the eleventh time, to choose a president for the country in light of the current crisis, due to the lack of a president and a government capable of managing the collapsed situation.
The failure of the Lebanese parliament to choose a president for the country comes at a time when divisions and economic collapse are hitting the country, as the exchange rate of the dollar recorded 50,000 pounds for the first time in Lebanon’s history.
The failure of the deputies to elect a president for the country means that the electoral process may take a long time, as no political party has a parliamentary majority that authorizes it to impose its candidate.
And the presidential vacuum in Lebanon coincides with the existence of a caretaker government that is unable to take fateful decisions, at a time when the country has been plunged since 2019 into an economic collapse that the World Bank has ranked among the worst in the world.
The Lebanese constitution provides for the election of a new president of the republic within a constitutional period that extends for two months before the end of the president’s term, and the candidate who obtains a majority of 86 votes in the first round of the election wins. A vote, and the president of the country whose term ends may not be re-elected, according to the Lebanese constitution, but he can run again after that in the following elections.
