The foreign ministers of the United States, France and Saudi Arabia, on September 21, issued a joint statement expressing their support for Lebanon. In the statement issued after representatives of the three countries met on the margins of the United Nations General Assembly, expressed their continuing support for Lebanon’s sovereignty, security, and stability. They stressed upon the importance of holding timely elections in compliance with the constitution to choose a new president and form a new government capable of implementing the structural and economic reforms, urgently needed to address Lebanon’s political and economic crises, specifically those reforms needed to reach an agreement with the International Monetary Fund.
In the statement, the three countries further expressed willingness to work jointly with Lebanon to support the implementation of these fundamental reform measures, which are critical to the country’s future prosperity, stability, and security.
The three countries acknowledged the critical role the Lebanese Armed Forces and the Internal Security Forces – as the legitimate defenders of Lebanon’s sovereignty and internal stability – continue to play in protecting the Lebanese people in a time of unprecedented crisis. They affirmed the need for the Lebanese government to implement the provisions of UN Security Council resolutions 1559, 1680, 1701, 2650, and other relevant international resolutions, including those issued by the Arab League, and commit to the Taif Agreement which enables the preservation of national unity and civil peace in Lebanon.
Multiple Messages
The joint US-French-Saudi statement aimed to send messages to various political actors in Lebanon that the international community is still interested in the situation, despite the fact that most political actors are ignoring all conceivable ways leading to the required political and economic reforms, on the hand, and also despite the current international crises, i.e. the ongoing war in Ukraine, on the other.
The intended messages can be outlined as follows:
1. The necessity to comply with constitutional deadlines:
Several crises and rifts between Lebanon’s political forces dominated the political, economic and social landscape highly. These complicated meeting constitutional commitments and deadlines following the recent legislative elections such as the formation of a new government, or those resulting from the end of President Michel Aoun’s presidential term and the need to elect a successor before the end of October 2022, and rendered all these processes uncertain.
Through their joint statement, the United States, France and Saudi Arabia, wanted to send a message to these Lebanese political forces and even regional powers that, however difficult, these commitments must be duly met and honored as stated in the constitution. This means, they demand that all existing obstacles to meeting these requirements, including insistence of some forces on shaping the country’s future without affecting their political and economic status, while other forces insist on making the whole process conditional on achieving a breakthrough in other regional and international issues.
2. The need to implement reforms:
Political and economic reforms represent an urgent need both for Lebanon and the international and regional powers. These powers are not willing to provide any support to Lebanon before these reforms are carried out lest this support be abused by the ruling elite to reposition themselves in the country’s political landscape thus perpetuating the country’s political and economic structural imbalances and failures.
Implementation of these required political reforms was already demanded by Paris, in an initiative it put forth following the Beirut Port blast of August 2020, but it was faced by foot-dragging and deliberate delay and reluctance by some forces, which eventually led to the initiative being undermined.
At the economic level, the reforms set by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a prerequisite for receiving minimum funding required to enable Lebanon to counter the pressing economic crisis. Some Lebanese political forces continue to evade implementation of the demands. This prompted the three states to use their regional and international political and economic weight to emphasize that supporting Lebanon is conditional, meaning that implementation of the required reforms is a prerequisite. Their aim was to place pressure on Lebanon’s ruling elite.
3. Renewing Legitimacy of the Taif Agreement:
In recent years, and on several occasions, especially in the wake of the October 2019 popular protests and the August 2020 blast at Beirut Port, calls emerged to establish a new social contract for Lebanon, with the start being an amendment of the 1989 Taif Agreement, which, despite being credited with putting an end to the decades-long civil war, is still criticized for being the cause of the accumulation of crises, in the political life in particular.
Reality at the domestic, regional and international levels shows that making amendments to the Taif Agreement, or even completely replacing it, is so difficult that it might well cause the deconstruction of the country’s societal structure. That is why all statements issued by international powers on the situation in Lebanon, including the recent trilateral statement, laid emphasis on the legitimacy of the Agreement as a pillar for enabling the preservation of national unity and civil peace in Lebanon. This would block any attempts to replace this agreement, officially known as the National Reconciliation Accord.
Limited Outcome
Despite the three powers’ keenness on imposing pressure on Lebanon to commit to meeting the deadlines set by the constitution for electing new president and prime minister, their effort has evidently failed to yield the desired results. The dynamics of this failure can be outlines as follows:
1. Reiteration of the same previous positions:
The trilateral statement is not that different from several other international joint statements and initiatives, in the sense that it reiterated the need for implementing the required reforms and international resolutions and laid stress on the legitimacy of the Taif Agreement. These include France’s initiative of August 2020, the joint Saudi-French statement of December 2021, Kuwait’s initiative for joint action between Lebanon and the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, announced in January 2022, and the statement issued by the July 2022 Jeddah Security and Development Summit.
2. Continued international attention to Lebanon:
The trilateral statement can be viewed as a wake-up call for Lebanon’s political powers to show them that the country is still at the center of international attention, and that international powers can, once again, place pressure and threaten to impose sanctions against those who derailed efforts to meet the constitutional deadlines and carry out the required reforms. That is why these forces were quick to reach an agreement on a draft budget for 2022 and have it passed at a 26 September parliament session thanks to the same simple majority of 64 votes that enabled the house to pass all recent deadlines since the latest legislative elections.
3. Lebanon’s partial response:
The trilateral statement stressed the need to meet constitutional deadlines, including the election of a new president. Accordingly, all Lebanese political forces rushed to take the required measures to enable the parliament to elect a new president for the country after they realized that any attempts to delay the constitutional process for as long as possible using various excuses - including an announcement by Speaker of the Parliament Nabin Berri that he will not call the house to hold a session to elect a new president if the required reforms are carried out- will be useless.
That is what would explain why Berri has called the parliament to convene on September 29 to elect a new president, although is well aware that political forces will not agree on naming a certain candidate. In fact, Berri made the call to prove to the international community that he is not among those calling for disrupting efforts to meet constitutional deadlines.
The parliament held that session on the date set by Berri but no candidate managed to receive the required majority of two thirds of votes. That is, 122 out of a total of 129 MPs attended the session, with 66 of them casting white (blank ballots. MP Michel Mouawad, son of the late president Rene Mouawad, received 36 out of the 86 votes required to win in the first round. Moreover, holding a second voting session was not possible because a number of MPs withdrew, disrupting the process. In a second voting session, a majority of 65 votes are required for winning the election.
Accordingly, the momentum for forming a new government might fade in the coming days until attitudes towards presidential nominees become clear. All the issues will have to be resolved before the constitutional deadline sets in, where the parliament becomes an electoral college in the period of ten days before the presidential term ends on October 20.
The statement issued by the cabinet on September 28 reiterates the caretaker government’s right to take over the presidency in case of failure to elect a new president. But there are signs that no new government will be formed before the deadline because of a recurrent disagreement between Prime Minister Najib Mikati on the one hand, and President Michel Aoun and his political team on the other, over the issue of forming a new government.
It is not clear how capable Hezbollah is of speeding up the process of forming a new government, although it called for the same recently. This is specially so because President Aoun wants a new government that ensures that he will maintain influence even after the end of his presidential term. Moreover, it is not clear whether Mikati’s threats that the caretaker government will take over the presidency, if no new president is not elected, will place pressure on Aoun to speed up the formation of a new government, especially because he emphasized, in early September, that such a government doesn't possess national legitimacy to replace the president. This was soon reiterated by Gebran Bassil, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement and son-in-law of Aoun, who said that the government, after the end of President Aoun’s term, will be considered to be a usurper of power and as illegitimate at the parliamentary, constitutional, National Pact and popular levels.
In conclusion, the joint statement of the United States, France and Saudi Arabia puts pressure towards meeting constitutional deadlines and implementing structural reforms, but the responding to this pressure by fulfilling these demands will hinge on agreement between the Lebanese political forces, something that the French initiative proved to be hard to achieve because it continues to be governed by domestic dynamics, on the one hand, and tied to regional and international roles and positions, on the other. This is what might make this statement more of a formality than a source of influence on the developments taking place in the country. However, at the same time, the statement can be viewed as a sign of a large-scale regional and international action to be taken about Lebanon in the coming period in an attempt to reach acceptable procedures for fulfilling the demands set by the three powers.
