Michel Sleiman, our election wild card
As expectations swing one way or the other on the results of Lebanon”s upcoming parliamentary elections in June, an important variable still remains unknown: Will President Michel Sleiman try to affect the outcome, and if so toward what purpose?
Publicly, the president has put on a front of irreproachable objectivity. He will not sponsor candidates, he has said many times, but if a parliamentary bloc emerges that places itself under the high patronage of Michel Sleiman, then he would certainly not reject it. However, that can only be part of the story, because the political future of the president, like his effectiveness after June, will be intimately tied in to the results of the elections. To put it bluntly, Sleiman will gain most if he holds the balance in Parliament between a March 14 bloc on the one side and the alliance between Hizbullah, Michel Aoun, and Nabih Berri on the other.
What about the other possible scenarios? If March 14 wins a decisive majority, let”s say of 70 seats or more, the president will have less room to maneuver, not least on the formation of the government, than if he holds the balance (though that would not necessarily be the case if he has enough parliamentarians allowing him to form a two-thirds majority with March 14, which is improbable). He will remain, much like today, a symbol of the state that the majority will be able to use against the Hizbullah-led opposition. Still, Sleiman will have some wiggling room to play both sides against each other, with the shortcoming that he will not control enough parliamentary seats to always do so very effectively.
The worst option for the president would be a decisive victory by the Hizbullah-Aoun-Berri alliance. This would permit the three blocs to alone choose the prime minister and hold a majority in the Cabinet. It might also mean, since Berri is certain to be re-elected as speaker of Parliament, that Sleiman could find himself uncomfortably isolated, given the likely affinities between the speaker and the prime minister, even if the latter happens to be Najib Mikati. At the same time, Sleiman would have to face a resurgent Michel Aoun doubtless seeking to marginalize the president as paramount representative of the Maronite Christians.
More generally, Sleiman realizes he can only thrive in a political context where the state gains in authority. That”s unlikely to happen, however, if Hizbullah and its partners come out of the elections stronger. The primary aim of the party in the event of a victory will be to set up and impose on the state a formal understanding protecting its own weapons, expanding its political, geographical and military autonomy, and placing the state at the service of the "resistance." That is precisely what Hizbullah”s secretary general, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, always planned as his "defense strategy." This process will involve, from the Lebanese side, undermining Resolution 1559, which calls for the disarmament of all militias in Lebanon and, through that, chipping away at Resolution 1701, the (imperfect) instrument of Hizbullah”s neutralization in South Lebanon.