الراعي: الحديث عن فراغ في الرئاسة "اهانة للوطن"

My dear Patriarch, the simple reason why they swiftly elected a speaker of the house(by the way he is been in that post for over 25 years)and a prime minister, because our neighb ouring countries paid them off in advance. in this situation there has been no payment or a promise of payments as of yet. So I would challenge the cleargy in Lebanon to stand up and accuse every single politician of selling the country for 30 pieces of silver...

The reasons that the Presidency can go to vacuum without much concern are two fold:
1) The position is largely ceremonial. The President is more of a symbol of the nation than a political leader or essential ingredient in the operation of the government;
2) The Presidency is the confessional seat of the Lebanese Christians. The Christians have fractured themselves, made themselves powerless and irrelevant. Unless the other confessional parties want a president, the Christian presidency goes vacant. Vacancy in the office is not the illness, it is the symptom of the illness of the Christian political leadership in Lebanon.

The Lebanese Christians have a special role in holding the country together, Sunni, Shia, Druze and Christian. But if the Christians are busy using their hands to point fingers, or stuff their pockets taking care of family before country, then their hands cannot be used to hold the county together.
One cannot serve his self interest and the nation. You cannot have two masters. Christian political leadership have dropped the country as they busy their hands with other matters and Hezbollah is there to catch the country and have so taken it.

@M11, no one is talking about ending diversity in the Christian political community. We would not be a Christian political community without diversity of opinion.
However, there are some things that are existential. We must first exist before we can be diverse. The Jews in Israel are very diverse politically, ethnically and even in how they practice Judaism. So there is more diversity among the Jews of Israel than among the Christians of Lebanon. But when it comes to Israel they are all of one voice and mind.

The division in the Christian community of whether to be in coalition with the Sunni parties or the Shia parties, has taken a confessional demographic minority in the population, the Lebanese Christians, and made them irrelevant. The portion that is with M14 is not enough to allow that coalition to govern and the portion that is with M8, likewise is not enough to allow that coalition to govern and so one cancels out the other and by so doing cancels out the State and democratic Institutions.

This leaves the Sunni Parties or the Shia Parties to control the state and since Hezbollah is armed, it controls to the detriment of Sunni, Druze and Christian, even the Christian parties aligned with Hezbollah, except for the Aoun family clique that is realizing an increase in wealth over the MOU arrangement. The FPM, read the Aoun Family, is becoming wealthy with this arrangement, so much so, that it will not let go for the interests of serving the interests of the State.

Hezbollah does not mind allow this to Aoun as it keeps him in the tent, which keeps the Christians divided,which keeps the State Institutions paralyzed and lapsed and this leaves Hezbollah with no effective domestic opposition to its agenda in Lebanon.