For the 12th time… the Lebanese parliament has failed to elect a president

Lebanon’s parliament failed again today (Wednesday) to elect a president for the twelfth time. Neither pro-Hezbollah candidate Suleiman Branji nor former finance minister Jihad Azour won enough votes to win the heated parliamentary session.

Azour received 59 votes compared to 51 votes for former minister Branji, one vote for Joseph Aoun, 6 votes for Ziad Baroud and 8 votes for the “New Lebanon” slogan, an invalid paper, a white paper and one lost vote.

Amid calls for a recount, Lebanese media reported that Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri adjourned the session after losing the quorum to elect a president. With 128 delegates entering the chamber, the session began after the quorum was reached.

The session ended after representatives of Hezbollah and its ally “Amal Movement” withdrew after the first round, disrupting the continuation of the quorum in the second round.

In the first round of voting, a candidate needs a two-thirds majority or 86 votes to win. A majority of 65 votes is required for a run-off. But a quorum requires two-thirds of two sittings.

Before the session, if “Hezbollah” and its allies overthrew the quorum to hold the second round, the policy they followed during the previous sessions, Azour could get a large number of votes in the first round.

Analysts suggested a scenario of entering a phase of “long vacuum” with the main candidates failing to secure a majority to decide the outcome.

“With significant international pressure and no settlement on a candidate, it could take months before a president is elected,” researcher and university professor Karim Bidar told AFP.

He believed that today’s session, like the previous sessions, was “a mechanism for political forces to determine their electoral weight”.

“The Hezbollah Candidate”

The stock of Azour, who joined the International Monetary Fund in 2017 and served as Lebanon’s finance minister between 2005 and 2008, has risen in recent weeks, following intense contacts with representatives opposed to Franjieh and declaring support for his candidacy.

Subsequently, Representative Michael Mowat, running for president and having received the largest number of votes in previous sessions without reaching the required majority, announced that he was withdrawing his candidacy in favor of Azure.

The Lebanese Forces party, which has a strong Christian parliamentary group, the Independent Patriotic Movement, Hezbollah’s most important Christian ally and rejects Franchi’s visit, and Druze leader Walid Jumblatt’s group … are among Azzurri’s most prominent supporters.

After supporting his candidacy, Azure temporarily stepped down as Director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department at the IMF. In his first remarks, he said he wanted his candidacy to be “a contribution to the solution, not an element added to the elements of the crisis”.

He insisted that he was “not a challenge to anyone”, in response to “Hezbollah”, many of whose representatives described Asur as a “confrontational” and “challenging” candidate.

Before entering the parliament hall today, Hezbollah representative Hassan Fadlallah called for a dialogue between political forces saying that “the president is created only by consensus”. “We don’t impose on others, we don’t want to be imposed on ourselves,” he said.

The head of the Hezbollah group, Representative Muhammad Raad, said (on Monday) that supporters of Azour’s candidacy, without naming him, “do not want to give him the presidency of the republic, but only to use him. To prevent the party’s candidate from reaching him,” referring to Branji.

In his speech (Sunday), Franjie affirmed that he would be “the president of all Lebanon” despite his alliance with “Hezbollah” and his friendship with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. He has leveled harsh criticism at opponents of his candidacy, who describe him as a “violent candidate” regarding “Hezbollah”.

And he said in a speech: “I remind them that in 2016 they supported the opposition candidate, President Michel Aoun.”

“The solution?”

In 2016, Aoun assumed the presidency after a two-and-a-half-year presidency based on a political settlement between Hezbollah and its rivals.

Although the Lebanon file appears to be out of the international and regional spotlight, France has been leading a movement to speed up a presidential election for months in vain.

Jean-Yves Le Drian, the former foreign minister appointed by Paris as special envoy to Lebanon, is expected to arrive in Beirut soon in a fresh bid to end the political crisis.

French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Anne-Claire Legendre said her country was calling on Lebanon to take Wednesday’s session “seriously and use the opportunity it offers to get out of the crisis”. He emphasized the “priority given by French diplomacy” to resolving the Lebanon crisis.

For his part, US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said: “Until a president is elected, we believe that Parliament should continue until the job is done.”

Lebanon has been running a caretaker government unable to make the necessary decisions for months since 2019, when the World Bank witnessed the world’s worst economic collapse since 1850. Urgent reforms are needed to provide financial support to the community.

According to Bidar, the sharp division between political forces would pave the way for “negotiations leading to a third-man solution and elections that could be pre-arranged like the previous ones in Lebanon’s history.”