2025-01-16
6 分钟There are few more difficult and less secure jobs anywhere in national government.
Since the modern Lebanese Republic was established a little over 80 years ago, it has churned through 52 prime ministers.
Only one has lasted longer than four years, billionaire construction tycoon Rafik Hariri, who actually racked up a decade in two stretches between 1992 and 2004 before being punished for his durability in 2005 by a truck bomb which destroyed his motorcade as he was driven along the Beirut corniche.
The latest to sit uneasily in this hottest of seats is Nawaf Salaam, currently occupying the infinitely less stressful and controversial post of president of the International Court of Justice.
Salaam has been wrangled into the position at least partly by the efforts of Lebanon's new president, Joseph Aoun, who was elected by Lebanon's parliament last week.
Aoun is also a newcomer to politics, having spent his career in the military.
He holds the rank of general and was until recently commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces.
Though the Western democratic world has in recent years furnished substantial evidence to support the theory that we should no more encour encourage inexperienced outsider politicians than we would allow enthusiastic amateurs to have a lash at dentistry or air traffic control in Lebanon's peculiar circumstances, the relative lack of political experience on Salaam and Ayoun's resumes may be an advantage, at which point a brief disquisition on the flaws built into Lebanon's peculiar political settlement becomes necessary.
It is called the National Pact, and it was agreed to the extent that anything in Lebanon is ever agreed.
When the modern state was founded in 1943, the idea underpinning the National Pact was to prevent any one of Lebanon's diverse and often rancorous ethno religious communities acquiring dominion over the others.
Among the key provisions of the National Pact is that the president must be a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, the speaker of parliament a Shia Muslim.
Among the key questions that clearly languished unanswered when the National Pact was being discussed was what could possibly go wrong for this compromise, however well intentioned it may have been, has not been conducive to decisive and collegiate government.
Instead, it has turned more or less everything into a partisan bun fight and or gridlock and hardened Lebanon's communities into irreducible, unreachable political blocks.
And if the the plan ever was to sacrifice decisive and collegiate government in the interests of peace, the most lackadaisical student of modern Lebanese history will have absorbed that this hasn't worked out too well either.
This new Lebanese government will resemble previous Lebanese governments in at least observing these power sharing conventions.
President Joseph Ayoun is a Maronite Christian, although no relation to the previous President Michel Ayoun, also a former general and commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces.
And it appears that the speaker of parliament will be as it has been since 1992 Nabi Beri, now 86, extremely eventful years old and one of very few fixed points in Lebanese politics, leader during the civil war of the Shia militia Amal, leader of the party of the same name ever since.
As to the key question, that is whether this Lebanese government will be capable of doing any actual governing of Lebanon, there are some grounds for cautious optimism.
One of the many, many, many problems that has confronted recent Lebanese governments has been the presence on Lebanon's small territory of what amounted to a parallel state, the fiefdom of heavily armed Shia party Hezbollah, who always profited from the paralysis of Lebanon's official structures.
Though Hezbollah st Sudanese elections and won seats in Lebanon's parliament, suspicions persisted that their emissaries were principally saboteurs.