Maronite Patriarch Bechara al-Rai. (Credit: NNA)
The Greek Orthodox metropolitan of Beirut, Elias Audi, on Sunday called for early parliamentary elections to be held if Lebanon's MPs remain "unable to fulfil their role" and elect a new president.
Speaking after more than 20 months of Parliament's failure to achieve political consensus on a successor to former President Michel Aoun, whose six-year term of office ended on Oct. 31, 2022, Audi said, "The MPs were called upon to elect a president of the republic before the end of [Michel Aoun's] term of office, but so far they have not responded to the call of duty."
Audi then said, "If they are unable to fulfil their role, or if they are at an impasse, don't they have the national and moral responsibility to tell those who elected them and entrusted them with the responsibility of representing them that this Parliament, in its current composition, is incapable of electing a president, and must therefore make way for another, through the democratic channels dictated by the constitution?"
The head of the Maronite Church, Bechara al-Rai also once again called on Sunday for an end to the presidential vacancy in Lebanon.
"We are experiencing a real crisis in Lebanon," Rai said during his Sunday homily, according to local media reports. "We must therefore return [to this crisis] so that Parliament elects a president in accordance with the constitution," he said.
More than a year after the last parliamentary session devoted to the election of a president of the republic, Lebanese MPs are still struggling to rally around a consensus candidate, as is the customary procedure for appointing a new president in Lebanon.
On Saturday, Dar al-Fatwa, Lebanon's highest Sunni authority, called for an end to the "spiral of deadlocks," saying that electing a president "requires dialogue between all the country's political components and parliamentary groups."
This article was originally published in French on L'Orient-Le Jour.