Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri speaks with FPM leader Gebran Bassil at Ain al-Tineh. (Credit: NNA)
Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri’s initiative has again fallen through. The head of the legislature has at the last minute been forced to backtrack on his plans to break with his traditional weekly session dedicated to electing a new president. Berri had, reportedly, intended to convert Thursday’s parliamentary meeting into a dialogue table in order to find a compromise on the presidential election.
Berri’s u-turn was due to the reluctance of the main Christian parties, both the Lebanese Forces and the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), who showed little enthusiasm for this approach.
Berri’s second invitation to dialogue comes at a time when the country has been without a president since the end of Michel Aoun’s term on Oct. 31. Meanwhile relations between the FPM and its only ally, Hezbollah, have been strained lately.
‘Political interests’
“The dialogue will probably not take place on Thursday,” a source close to the speaker told L’Orient-Le Jour. “Berri is in contact with all the parliamentary blocs, and the Christian parties seem reluctant.”
Indeed, Berri had already announced in a statement that Parliament would convene Thursday for a regular session in a bid to elect a president — the tenth attempt since the end of September.
“The narrow political interests of some parties have again prevailed,” said Michel Moussa, MP for Sour-Zahrani and member of Berri’s Amal bloc.
This is not Berri’s first attempt to convene a dialogue aimed at cooking up a presidential compromise. A few days before the end of Aoun’s mandate on Oct. 31, he proposed holding a similar meeting before giving up in the face of the Christian parties’ opposition.
“Dialogue is the only way to unblock the situation. There have been nine electoral sessions since September, and until today, the situation has hardly moved one iota,” another source close to Berri told L’Orient-Le Jour.
He went on to say, “Berri has once again put the protagonists in front of two options: either holding a 10th session on Thursday, which will once again end in failure, or a meeting of the heads of the various parliamentary blocs to dialogue and find a way out of this crisis.”
But despite the risk of a prolonged presidential vacuum, the Christian parties, although primarily concerned by the lack of a head of state, do not see it in the same light.
It was the LF that first expressed its clear opposition to dialogue by publishing a statement on Tuesday, expressing its “refusal of any dialogue.”
Samir Geagea’s party also called on Berri to “withdraw his call for dialogue” and “to hold open [parliamentary] sessions until a president is elected.”
“We are afraid that the dialogue will become as usual a mere exercise in formality procedure,” LF spokesman Charles Jabbour told L’Orient-Le Jour.
He continued, “We believe that it might be more appropriate for Nabih Berri to call the MPs, after the first round of voting, to a meeting in his office to encourage them to come back and elect a president in the second round.”
The Amal-Hezbollah MPs and their allies have been indeed withdrawing from the sessions after the first round in order to cause a lack of quorum.
They have also been casting blank ballots in the first round vote at each, seemingly waiting for a compromise to be reached around a candidate, at least within the March 8 camp.
While the two Shiite parties are pushing for the election of their ally and Marada Movement leader Sleiman Frangieh, the FPM, the main Christian component of this camp, does not endorse this candidacy.
Tensions with the two Shiite parties
Moreover, the FPM also seems not to have much appetite for Berri’s dialogue, even if it has not said so as clearly as its Christian rival.
FPM leader Gebran Bassil left the door open for his party’s participation in the dialogue.
“For the dialogue to succeed, it requires preparation. A failure would be catastrophic,” he warned in an interview with LBCI on Sunday evening.
“We are not opposed to dialogue. On the contrary, we are convinced that this is the only way to elect a president,” an FPM official told L’Orient-Le Jour.
An FPM internal meeting was supposed to take place Dec. 13 to decide on the issue, but it was postponed because Bassil is traveling to Qatar for a week.
This is his fifth visit to the emirate in less than 10 months and it comes a few days after the visit of Lebanese army chief, Joseph Aoun, a serious presidential candidate, to the small oil state.
“We have not yet decided on participation in the dialogue, because we need to know more about the modalities of this process,” the FPM source said. “But above all, Nabih Berri must take a step to ease the tensions between us.”
The FPM has indeed been at loggerheads with the two Shiite parties since a cabinet meeting held last week at the initiative of caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati.
The FPM considered the holding of this meeting an infringement on the president’s prerogatives, but the party’s boycott of the session did not succeed in provoking a lack of quorum.
The FPM accuses Berri of motivating Mikati — who went to Ain al-Tineh, Berri’s residence, on Tuesday — to stand up to the FPM camp and to challenge the Christians in general.
“You can’t stab someone and then invite them to a dialogue,” Bassil said during Sunday’s interview.
While Berri’s dialogue seems to be on the back burner for the moment, the pertinent question is: will the inter-Christian dialogue which Bassil is seeking, under the leadership of Patriarch Bechara al-Rai, become an alternative?
The FPM leader called on Friday, from the Maronite church’s seat at Bkirki, for Christian parties to agree on a candidate.
This attempt, however, seems doomed to failure, as Rai did not appear enthusiastic about the idea of convening Christian participants. Also, Geagea has nipped the idea of dialogue with the FPM in the bud.
FPM MP Alain Aoun, meanwhile, told L’Orient-Le Jour, “We see inter-Christian dialogue as complementary to a national dialogue or as a way to an interfaith understanding. It is not a question of replacing Nabih Berri’s initiative.”
While the LF refuses to accept the FPM’s offer, Rai could try to hold bilateral meetings with the different actors.
“The patriarch is always attached to inter-Christian dialogue,” a source close to the patriarch told L’Orient-Le Jour.
This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour. Translation by Sahar Ghoussoub.
