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The House of Representatives, which has the competence to nominate an appointed president, is used to going to binding consultations, knowing in advance who will appoint him and the references who appointed him before him. This happened in the long Syrian era, when Damascus was the one who chose the designated president and instructed his allies, the heads of the main parliamentary blocs, to appoint him, so the constitutional authority of Parliament is weak and delusional. He cannot propose the name of another candidate, with rare exceptions for votes less than the fingers of one hand. This tradition continued into the post-2005 era and has been stable since the Doha Agreement three years later.
Today, Parliament is called to the same task, but without an appointed president, which has opened the door to speculation – due to this ambiguity – to talk about the possibility of delaying it. Until now, the President of the Republic has insisted on the date without assuming that there is a constitutional problem – and there is no justification for it – just because the deputies have no candidate to appoint him to form the government.
There is nothing in Article 53 of the Constitution, amended in 1990 with the transfer of power from the President of the Republic to the House of Representatives, that leads to the expectation that a constitutional problem will arise due to the absence of a nominated candidate at the time from the start of binding consultations. Article 53 does not require a declaration of candidacy along the lines of Article 49, which does not require a candidacy for the presidency of the republic, nor does it impose a specific quorum for the winner of the assignment, as if half +1. The nomination will be won by the candidate who obtains the majority of the votes of the representatives, in a way that does not make the number of participants in the binding consultations less than the quorum of the absolute majority of them, so that that winner obtains the Half House approval + one on consultations as a right in itself, regardless of the number of its supporters. This means that a candidate can obtain less than the quorum of the absolute majority of votes to win the nomination. More than one candidate can share the votes of the deputies participating in the binding consultations, and obtain a relative majority of those who vote, and the one with the highest number wins. The small number of votes does not reduce the legitimacy of the mandate, but it does affect the relationship of the designated president with the House of Representatives and its blocs. Prime Minister Rafic Hariri won in 1998, at the beginning of President Emile Lahoud’s term, 64 votes less than the absolute majority quorum, for which he was offended and apologized, while President Najib Mikati obtained 57 votes in 2005 , at the height of the division of the country between the forces of March 8 and 14 and formed his first government.
There is no constitutional gap in this mechanism in Article 53, which obliges the President of the Republic, regardless of the number of votes and the number of candidates, to leave a written record of who appointed him before the deputies and count the number of votes, then summon the designated president. Given the insistence on reducing the powers of the President of the Republic in the deliberations of the Taif Agreement, constitutional authority passed from him to the House of Representatives, so it is said that he – not the President of the Republic – elects the First Minister.
However, this mechanism was never useless because it was not implemented, in the Syrian era as in its aftermath, and it is no longer more than ink on paper. The House of Representatives did not exercise this jurisdiction, nor did the President-designate – no President-designate – emanate from it. Rather, he was called to consecrate what Syria had decided until 2005, or what resulted from the agreement of the Sunni and Shiite parties from that time to the present day. Therefore, naming the designated president since 1990 has made no sense, and the man has not gained any significant status except for his transformation into a tool to achieve the fundamental objective, which is to form a government. It is definitely an exaggeration to say, since to this day, the President of the Republic and the President-designate were the ones who chose their government in accordance with their constitutional powers.
It is no secret that, between 1990 and 2004, Damascus distributed the actions of the governments that supervised them under Presidents Elias Hrawi and Emile Lahoud. Each of the three presidents has their share of ministerial names that she doesn’t anger, if you don’t want to elect her. As for the rest, he is in his part in order to obtain a two-thirds majority and seize all the procedural power. It is not in vain to say that none of the successive heads of government since then, nor the two successive presidents of the republic – perhaps with the exception of the government of President Salim al-Hoss in 1998 – declared that they had formed their governments. In turn, the elder Hariri, from his first government in 1992 to the last one in 2003, continued to complain and complain that most of his ministers were imposed on him, except for his low participation in fat. Read the full article Press here.
