The series of bank robberies committed by Lebanese savers seeking to recover their savings frozen for three years, which has attracted the attention of foreign media in recent weeks, has overshadowed the presidential election currently underway in Lebanon.
The non-renewable six-year term of the current president, ex-general Michel Aoun, coming to an end on October 31, the process indeed began on September 29 in Parliament - where the 128 deputies have the constitutional power to elect the head of state - to replace him.
The ballot takes place by secret ballot and the President of the Republic is elected by a two-thirds majority in the first round and by an absolute majority in the following rounds.
Unsurprisingly, the first parliamentary session was not fruitful.
Faced with the divisions that reign within the political class, no consensus has yet been found to choose Michel Aoun's successor.
The latter is so polarized that it is already quite incapable of agreeing to form a new government, replacing the one currently led by Prime Minister Najib Mikati, responsible for handling current affairs since May 22, the date of the start of the mandate of the new Parliament…
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An exercise in pure form
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The majority of the 122 votes cast on September 29 were thus white (63 votes, including that of the current power composed of elected officials from Hezbollah and Michel Aoun's party), while Michel Moawad, Maronite deputy and son of President René Moawad assassinated in 1989, won 36 votes from the ranks of the opposition.
It should be noted that a voice was dedicated to Mahsa Amini, the young Iranian woman who died on September 16 in Tehran, after being arrested by the morality police for having worn her veil incorrectly, and whose death sparked the protest movement in courses in Iran.
At the end of this first electoral session, described by the French-language daily L'Orient-le-Jour "as a purely formal exercise", the President of Parliament Nabih Berri closed the session: parliamentarians had withdrawn from the Chamber causing a quorum failure.
The new session, scheduled for Thursday, October 13, will most certainly lead to the same result.
According to the Constitution, if the election is not held during the last ten days of the mandate of the incumbent president, the Parliament can no longer legislate because it has the obligation to hold only presidential sessions.
Already confronted daily with the worst economic crisis in the history of the country, the Lebanese know that the presidential process can last a long time.
Very long even.
For lack of agreement between the different political camps and political blockages, they had endured 29 months of institutional vacuum after the end of the mandate of former President Michel Sleiman, on May 25, 2014.
At the time, it was not until the 46th electoral session and endless negotiations that the two-thirds quorum necessary to organize the vote - i.e. 86 of the 128 deputies - was reached and that Michel Aoun, the political ally of Hezbollah pro-Iranian, be elected on October 31, 2016.
A post reserved for Maronite Christians
The Taif Accords, signed in 1989 in Saudi Arabia with the aim of ending fifteen years of war in Lebanon, transferred executive power to the Council of Ministers, the prerogatives of the president are limited.
For example, in matters of defence, the Head of State is indeed designated as the commander of the armed forces, but these remain "subject to the Council of Ministers" according to the texts which have enacted the principle of confessional democracy. and consociational - that is, a political model based on the need to share power between different communities.
Officially, the Lebanese state has 18: Christians (Maronites, Greek-Orthodox, Greek-Catholic Melkite, Syrian-Orthodox, Syrian-Catholic, Assyrian, Chaldean, Coptic Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Armenian Catholic, Latin and Protestant), Muslims (Shiites, Druze, Sunnis, Ismailis and Alawites) as well as a Jewish community.
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The formal representation of these religious communities in the Lebanese State (official and administrative functions) is organized in accordance with the National Pact of 1943, the year of the country's independence.
Sealed at the time between the Maronite and Sunni leaders of the country, this unwritten pact stipulates that the President of the Republic and the head of the army are always Christians - precisely Maronites - while the Prime Minister is Sunni and that the President of Parliament is a member of the Shia community.
Since Taif, the 128 seats of deputies have been distributed equally between Muslims and Christians, and within these two confessional blocs the number of elected members is fixed according to the demographic weight of their community (the Shiites have 27, the Maronites of 34), fixed by the last census carried out … in 1932.
Set up to promote consensus, the system has been hijacked over the years by the heavyweights of the political class, against which the population rose up in 2019, who multiplied political blockages and erected political bargaining as a mode of governance.
During the election of Michel Aoun, one camp, that of the former general and Hezbollah, his political ally, had thus succeeded in imposing its candidate after having blocked the presidential election for a long time.
Six years later, this same camp, which nevertheless lost its majority during the last legislative elections, is trying to promote the coming to power of the outgoing president's son-in-law, the former foreign minister Gebran Basil.
His divisive profile is far from unanimous in Lebanon.
A new arm wrestling is therefore likely to begin and drag out the time to agree on a compromise candidate to unblock the current situation.
While more than 80% of the population lives below the poverty line according to the NGO Care, the Lebanese, more than ever, need their institutions to operate at full speed.
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