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World – Lebanon
Neither the two presidents agree, nor does the designated president speak in turn with the affected blocs, and he does not ask for a mediator to help him overcome the obstacles.
It is not usual for the Speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri, to be far from whatever role he plays in the crisis of government formation and to support the Fatwa in overcoming obstacles. It is also unusual what he says in front of the few visitors he meets, as if he had succumbed to a vacuum: “Nobody talks to anyone, as if there were no government formation. If some are waiting for the arrival of the president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden, to the White House, is it not certain that we will endure until then? ”.
Although Berri acknowledges that he has no constitutional role in the formation of the government, except consulting with him as the head of a balanced bloc, and does not intervene unless his opinion is asked, and does not mediate except when he is called to mediation, but his surprise is that communication between the parties involved in the composition is completely cut off. Throughout his long experience, especially in the last decade, the dialogue of a designated president and the blocs did not stop once with all the disputes and rivalries that he stained for him.
After every meeting between Lebanese President Michel Aoun and Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri, it only leaked into what they disagreed on. What they say after one encounter that is positive, followed by another, annihilates everything they seemed to have understood, in terms of quotas, bags and names. The naive sense of their meetings, which Hariri insists on highlighting, is that they are the only ones who make up the government, since they have constitutional authority. The president in charge of the authorship has no partner other than the president of the republic, but at a later stage after its drafting.
It’s not long before the origin is clarified: no aid is under pressure to quit. Hariri is also not rushing to form a government, except that his late father, Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, was unable to form one once. What the father could not do with the Syrians and the main factions of his co-authors, the number of the two presidents of the republic who accompanied him, the son scares the hopes that he will do it: that he himself form his entire government. The President of the Republic signs his decrees. He elects Christian and Sunni ministers and approves Shiite and Druze ministers. He brings who he wants and excludes who he wants.
The apparent occurrence of what happens when counting the meetings between the two presidents is healthy as long as the constitution places the composition between them alone. Underneath it is much more difficult, after the reality of forming any government since the Doha Agreement, in violation of the Taif Agreement and devoid of the presence of Syria, has become a collective action in which the main blocs participate. The right of veto and its participation are equal, and therefore there is no government without it, and there is no will over it except the apology of the appointed president.
What happened since Hariri was appointed a month ago, on October 22, as before him when he was assigned to Ambassador Mustafa Adib and the reasons for his apology, shows both the apparent nullity and the hidden one. Neither the President of the Republic and the President designated by themselves are capable of forming a government – as holders of constitutional jurisdiction – without returning to the main blocs, nor is the agreement with the large parliamentary blocs alone sufficient for the new government see the light. Upon his assignment, Hariri revealed that his mission was almost accomplished, after he agreed with the Shiite duo and Walid Jumblatt on their actions, as long as he and the President of the Republic administered the Christian quotas, ignoring the role of MP Gebran Bassil and his parliamentary bloc before and after the imposition of the United States sanctions. With the passage of a month after the handover, he put himself in a more complex situation: neither the Shiite duo part passed, nor was Basil a fruitful oversight, nor did the sanctions weaken the president. Hariri lost the role that was assigned to him to shape his vision of the new government, and could no longer help monitor everything that resulted from his assignment since October 22, and expects some upheaval from outside:
1 – When the French presidency says that it wants the Lebanese government to have ministers of international trust, it establishes the specifications for the designated president that it cannot find among the names that it brought to the president of the republic, nor among others that it will call for the blocks and parties that Paris on his initiative wants to exclude him from the government. . And when the Americans ask for a government in which there is no direct or indirect representation of Hezbollah, this means that part of the whole, that is, the formation of the government, has been internationalized, and is in the international light, not just saying what wants and does not want, but is finished and imposed. In part of this ban, Hariri hints that nine of his aides may be subject to sanctions if Hezbollah is included in his government by any name.
2 – Despite the belief that Hariri has not abandoned the connection of his conflict with Hezbollah, and his certainty – for local and sectarian reasons rather than following the American arguments – that there is no government without his consent represented by his participation in its formation, at the same time, knows that it is too weak to dare to put a draft in which there are representatives, direct or indirect, of Hezbollah. What seemed to be available with its predecessor, Adeeb, is now impossible. It is no longer useful, and it is important to show that he abandoned the money portfolio for the Amal movement and accepted a portfolio of services for Hezbollah, such as health, and left them the freedom to choose their ministers. A show like this, Hariri was the first to introduce the Shiite duo when it was commissioned to Adeeb, and contributed to the exclusion of the predecessor who was assigned to present it himself.
That concession fell as soon as the Americans informed him of their refusal to put the money bag in the hands of the Amal movement, so that Hezbollah could not obtain funds through it for its activities that the Americans consider terrorist. The inclusion of the name of the former minister, Ali Hassan Khalil, on the US sanctions list on September 8, was not a message to the Amal movement that it would be content to refuse to return the bag, but to confirm that it will not be in the hands of any minister linked to the movement and the party at the same time. The same is related to placing a portfolio of services with Hezbollah, even through a specialized minister. The ambassador to Beirut, Dorothy Shea, had given a negative signal beforehand when she revealed that her government’s reluctance to provide assistance to the Ministry of Health under its current specialist minister, Hamad Hassan, was due to her association with the party.
3- It is no secret to anyone that the US sanctions and the insinuations, and that after the possibility of the European sanctions being added, they have become an integral part of the management of the country’s internal political conflict. These sanctions are no longer an ethical stance linked to accountability and punishment for violating laws and widespread corruption, insofar as they are at the center of breaking Lebanese delicate balances. When the US sanctions were imposed on Bassil, they appeared for a short time, and many volunteered to promote them as the moral responsibility of a corrupt person, before the Americans first revealed the secrecy of these sanctions and attributed them to its alliance with Hezbollah. Therefore, Basilio and Hezbollah are equal among the Americans, not only in expelling them from the international banking system, but also in including them in the list of those who are supposed to be outside the Lebanese authority, and the belief that it is easy to build a new authority, beginning with the formation of a government in which they have no place.
When the confrontation between Washington and Hezbollah turns direct on Lebanese soil, the formation of the government and the role of the appointed president becomes secondary and marginal to their work.
(Lebanese news)
