WE WILL NOT HAVE A PRESIDENT FORCED UPON US!
July 9, 2024Michel Douaihy, a Lebanese Member of Parliament, refuses to sit down in a dialogue with members of the resistance bloc prior to holding presidential elections. He states that this is part of a Lebanese tradition where presidents are “appointed” rather than “elected” which is contrary to democratic practices.
“There is a political culture in the country… that has been emerging for some time, which is that people impose a reality because, for many who work in politics in the country today, democracy is a formality… Meaning that we agree on things and names from abroad and we use the Lebanese institutions… as folklore and formality, even though we have agreed long before that.”
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English Script:
Michel Douaihy: Why did we reach this stage today? There is a reason why we don’t have a president, and there is a reason why there is a Quintet Committee of Ambassadors, again, they are friends of Lebanon, and we want to have the best relations with them. The reason is that there is a political team in Lebanon today that isn’t allowing the election of a president. The biggest proof is that from June 14 to today, there has been no call for it. In the June 14 session, one candidate received 59 votes in the first round, and another candidate received 51 votes in the first round, and we did not go to the second round. Therefore, the existence of the Quintet Committee is a direct result of the presence of a group in the country, namely the resistance coalition, which prevents the election of a President of the Republic. This is first, and secondly, why did we reach this stage today? Here, we delve deeper into the topic. There is a political culture in the country, George, that has been emerging for some time, which is that people impose a reality because, for many who work in politics in the country today, democracy is a formality. What do I mean by formality? Let’s go deeper into it. Meaning that we agree on things and names from abroad and we use the Lebanese institutions, whether the government, the parliament, or the presidential elections, as folklore and formality, even though we have agreed long before that. And when the second party says, “Yes, the elections for the President of the Republic have always been decided externally,” This is wrong. We are a new generation that’s here to say that if historically the name of a president was imposed on Lebanon, we are here to say that there are mechanisms. In 1958, Egypt’s Abdel Nasser and America’s Eisenhower agreed on a great man in the Lebanese state named Fouad Chehab, another great man named Raymond Edde, ran against him and got 5 or 6 votes. Why did he do that? To say that in Lebanon we do not want to appoint a president, we want elections. This is exactly the logic we are looking for, this kind of men and behavior.
