A Gentle Reminder

Lebanon’s political stalemate continues as parliament remains unable to elect a new president. Last week, the Druze leader Walid Joumblatt initiated contacts to try to see if a compromise candidate could be found. While his efforts might achieve nothing, what were Joumblatt’s moves actually about?

Many speculated that they were timed to coincide with a meeting in Paris on February 6, bringing together the United States, France, Qatar, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. The meeting reportedly has set a road map for the direction that these countries would like Lebanon to take. However, Joumblatt’s initiative mainly seemed to have a domestic dimension and it is worth focusing on this more closely.

In January, Joumblatt proposed three possible consensus candidates, namely the army commander Joseph Aoun, the former parliamentarian Salah Honein, and the former finance minister and current director of the International Monetary Fund’s Middle East and Central Asia Department, Jihad Azour. Joumblatt brought these names up with a Hezbollah delegation that visited him last month.

Joumblatt’s first message was that the main Hezbollah-backed candidate, Suleiman Franjieh, does not have enough votes to be elected. Franjieh has been opposed by the two main Christian parliamentary blocs—one led by Gebran Bassil’s Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), the other by Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces. Given that Joumblatt’s bloc would have to vote in favor of Franjieh for him to have any chance of winning an election, the Druze leader’s search for compromise candidates brought home to Hezbollah and its ally Nabih Berri, the speaker of parliament, that they might not be able to count on his votes.

Joumblatt may simply be raising the ante with Franjieh, to squeeze concessions out of him in exchange for his bloc’s votes. However, the optics of his initiative didn’t really seem to signal this. And Joumblatt would have good reasons not to vote for Franjieh. A third of his electorate in the Shouf is made up of Maronite Christians, the community from which presidents are selected, so he has no incentive to alienate them by helping to shoehorn Franjieh into the presidency against the will of most Christians. Moreover, another third of Joumblatt’s electorate is Sunni, and a group of Sunni parliamentarians from the north recently visited the army commander to express solidarity with Aoun after Bassil, himself a presidential hopeful, attacked him in a speech. This suggested they might not welcome a Franjieh presidency either. It is also noteworthy that the Sunnis’ main regional sponsor, Saudi Arabia, has shown little enthusiasm for Franjieh.

Joumblatt is particularly sensitive to Saudi thinking these days, and realizes that a Franjieh who relies on Hezbollah for his election might ultimately provoke Riyadh’s hostility. If so, Lebanon would remain cut off from the Gulf states at a time when the economic consequences of this continue to be devastating.

If Franjieh’s election is seriously compromised, what of those whom Joumblatt proposed? Salah Honein and Jihad Azour are certainly credible, but in mentioning them Joumblatt likely had other aims than securing acceptance of either man. Honein is a respected lawyer from Kfarshima and in the past he won a seat in parliament on a Joumblatt-backed list, even if his family has a political legacy of its own. In proposing compromise candidates, Joumblatt could not help but put forward the name of a moderate political ally, even if he must realize that Honein’s presidential chances are limited.

As for Azour, by mentioning him Joumblatt perhaps sought to send a message that he favored economic reform, at a time when foreign governments are increasingly doubtful that Lebanon will ever implement an IMF program. Azour, like Honein, is the kind of candidate whom Joumblatt favors, namely a Maronite Christian who is unlikely to polarize opinion by exploiting sectarian susceptibilities, and who ultimately will not rock the boat in a way that might damage the interests of the sectarian ruling class.

Joseph Aoun is a different entity altogether. While nothing indicates that Joumblatt is less than sincere in mentioning Aoun’s candidacy, several factors should make one think twice about this. First, whenever candidates are mentioned publicly in Lebanon, it is often designed to set them up as targets at which the country’s political factions can fire. When Samir Geagea praised Aoun several months ago, this was widely seen as an effort to undermine him, since Geagea understood that anyone whom he endorsed would be reflexively opposed by Hezbollah.

Moreover, like other members of the political class, Joumblatt has traditionally been wary of army commanders being elected to the presidency. For Lebanese sectarian leaders, former military men are anchored in a credible, popular national institution that can act as a serious counterweight to their power. Joumblatt was one of those who extended the mandate of president Elias Hrawi in 1995 in order to delay the election of the army commander at the time, Emile Lahoud. When Lahoud eventually became president in 1998, Joumblatt opposed him, as he opposed Michel Aoun, another former army commander, afterward. That’s why it takes some effort to assume the Druze leader fervently favors Joseph Aoun.

On the other hand, because the army is seen as an alternative to Hezbollah and Joseph Aoun has not hesitated to protect its stakes against the party (even as he has coordinated closely with Hezbollah), the commander remains the man most likely to enjoy Gulf support, as well as Egyptian backing. These are hardly unimportant factors for Joumblatt. On top of this, given that Lebanon effectively has a hung parliament, Aoun is the only candidate around whom a consensus can coalesce. The military still enjoys respect nationally as well as internationally, a major advantage for those keen to end Lebanon’s isolation.

So what is Joumblatt playing at? It’s hard to say, but one message is clear. By throwing out a panoply of alternative candidates, he affirmed that a Franjieh without broad national and sectarian backing was not someone his bloc would vote for. His meeting with Hezbollah two weeks ago may have been designed to transmit his intentions to the party. By floating the army commander’s candidacy, he may have wanted to win points regionally and internationally, even if he knew from his conversations with Hezbollah that it would not accept an Aoun presidency.

Indeed, the remarks last Saturday of Mohammed Raad, the head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, were seen by some people as being directed implicitly against Joseph Aoun. Raad stated that the party’s enemies—many of which are known to appreciate the army commander—were “trying to turn the presidential [election] … into a platform for bringing in a president who will implement their policies and continue their scheme of tightening the noose on the resistance.”

If that’s the case, what does Joumblatt hope to gain? For one thing, he has placed himself squarely at the center of the national search for a compromise candidate. The names Joumblatt proposed might or might not take off, but if any of them do Joumblatt will come across as a kingmaker. More likely, Joumblatt has reminded everyone that his bloc is essential for any agreement on the presidency, which many people appeared to forget as all the attention recently has been on how Bassil’s rift with Hezbollah over Franjieh is the main obstacle to such an agreement. This reality greatly reinforces Joumblatt’s political leverage at an important moment.

Does this mean that Joumblatt’s presidential initiative is little more than tactical maneuvering? It’s difficult to say, and perhaps there is more to it than meets the eye. But don’t hold it against people for believing that presidential politics in Lebanon these days is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.