Lebanon’s parliament fails to elect a president for the fifth time
Several crises are currently unfolding in Lebanon, following the failure of the parliament to elect a president for the fifth time. This session comes more than a week after the country entered a presidential vacuum, following the end of the term of former President Michel Aoun on October 31st.
Session Details
The last voting session saw the candidate Michel Mouawad obtain 44 votes out of 108 deputies who attended the session to vote, while 47 MPs abstained from voting by presenting a “white paper”, while the other votes were distributed on more than one name, in addition to Speaker Nabih Berri raising the session of electing a president for the Republic because of the lack of a quorum in the second round of voting, and on November 17 to elect a new president. This comes in light of the unprecedented division of the parliament after the elections of last May, as the political blocs were unable to reach a consensus on a candidate to succeed Aoun.
New failure
Dr. Mohammed Said al-Arz, a Lebanese political analyst, said that the Lebanese parliament will not witness any decisive trends towards the election of a new president, but they failed again to elect the country’s president. This requires the political forces to reach a consensus among the Lebanese political forces on a new president, to be elected by the Lebanese parliament.
The Lebanese political analyst added that Lebanon is in a real disaster as a result of the many economic and political crises that the country is experiencing, in light of a parliamentary failure that did not meet the needs of his country and the consensus for the interest of the country.
A crisis threatens “Lebanon”
The ruling system in Lebanon is in control of all the aspects of the state, and it controls the tracks and does not care who the president is, even if he is from inside or outside the country, he said. He said he will not change anything if there is no change in this rule. The Lebanese political writer added that the failure of the parliament for the fifth time in electing and naming the president of the country and the dispute over him today is an expression of the crisis existing in the Lebanese street and all the aspects of the state.
The Lebanese political writer explained that this system is trying, through disrupting the election process, to lure out external intervention, and that there is clearly a kind of back management, and this is the result of other priorities and challenges facing the state, pointing out that Lebanon is facing a real crisis on all levels that threatens the existence of the Lebanese state, and that this system realizes that any rescue operation requires external intervention to overthrow the state. It is worth mentioning that since 2019 Lebanon has been witnessing an economic collapse classified by the World Bank among the worst in the world, where the local currency lost about 95% of its value, while the official exchange rate is still fixed at 1507 L/dollar, and that crisis has accompanied a political paralysis until now, without taking measures to reduce the quality of the population living under 80% of poverty.
