Samir Geagea, leader of the Lebanese Forces, during an interview at his residence in Maarab, north of the capital Beirut, on May 20, 2022. (Credit: Joesph Eid/AFP)
Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea stated that the “disintegration of the Free Patriotic Movement” was “in the interest of Lebanon as a whole,” during an interview given on Thursday evening to Al-Arabiya FM, the radio station of the Saudi news channel, the main extracts of which he relayed on X.
“The disintegration of the FPM is in the interests of Lebanon as a whole, and not just the LF, given the FPM's trajectory in power in recent years, in all the issues that its members have managed and continue to manage, the most important of which is electricity,” said Geagea, referring to the rival Christian political party founded by former President Michel Aoun.
Currently led by Aoun's son-in-law, Gebran Bassil, the party has nominated and supported all the personalities who have held the posts of Minister of Energy and Water, on which Electricite du Liban depends, and which is insufficient to supply the whole country with electricity 24 hours a day.
In recent months, the FPM has also seen a wave of dismissals and resignations among its members, some of whom have been with the organization since its inception and are at odds with its leadership.
Geagea's comments were sharply criticized on X by Ghassan Khoury, one of the FPM's executives.
“A bad person can only wish ill on others”, he said, taking an excerpt from the LF leader's statements.
Geagea also explained why he had not mentioned the Taif Accords in his speech a few days earlier at the ceremony to honor the party's “martyrs.”
“Every speech has a specific context, and I prefer to talk about subjects that correspond to that context,” he clarified, deeming it pointless to mention the subject unnecessarily.
The Taif Agreement was concluded in 1989 in the Saudi city towards the end of the Lebanese Civil War and gave rise to the Constitution of the Second Lebanese Republic. Noting that the LF were and still are the greatest defenders of this agreement, for which they had paid a “heavy price” (he himself was imprisoned from 1994 to 2005), he added that “we have every reason to be the most committed supporters of the Taif Agreement."
"However, if we want to be objective, after 34 years of implementation, there is no real state in Lebanon. The current situation, as everyone can see, is that the strategic decision of the State is stolen, we have no stability and the Lebanese citizen lives without knowing what tomorrow holds. This reality in which we live forces us to stop and rethink everything very deeply, to see where the problem lies,” continued the LF leader. “The most important thing is to achieve a real state in Lebanon. The question is what we should do to achieve this goal, because right now we don't have a real state in Lebanon; on the contrary, the state is deteriorating more and more.”
On the question of the call for dialogue launched last weekend by the Speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri, to unblock the presidential election and find a successor to Aoun, whose term of office expired at the end of October 2022, Geagea maintained his decision to boycott the initiative.
“I am flexible, but I cannot be flexible in the face of Hezbollah's decision to start a war in southern Lebanon,” he stated, calling Berri's initiative "unconstitutional."
He also sent a message of friendship to the Gulf countries, the relationship between LF and Riyadh being one of the few that the kingdom has maintained since 2019.
“I have not seen people who love Lebanon more than those of the Gulf countries and the Saudi people in particular. But they turned their faces away from Lebanon five years ago and until today. Not because they don't like Lebanon, but because they saw that something was out of place in this country,” he said. “The reality in which we live demands that we stop and look carefully at what has happened, to see where the problem lies.”
Geagea also stated that Hezbollah's entry into the war against Israel in southern Lebanon on Oct. 8, 2023, the day after the Gaza war, was a strategic error that had given the Israelis a pretext.
“Nobody knows how long the situation can remain as it is, because the sequence of military operations on the one hand and the sequence of political events on the other will determine the course of events,” he added.
Finally, he reiterated that Lebanon could no longer bear the burden of the two million Syrian refugees living illegally on its territory, considering that this was no longer a “humanitarian issue,” but a “purely economic” one.
This article originally appeared in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.