Vacuum and paralysis: Lebanon's political crisis deepens

Before bowing out, President Michel Aoun delivered a final broadside against caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati.

"This morning, I sent a letter to parliament and signed a decree that considers the government resigned," he told supporters before leaving the palace in the hills above Beirut.

Experts say the move will likely not impact the work of Mikati's government, which has remained in a caretaker role since legislative elections in the spring.

But it was part of ongoing political arm-wrestling between Aoun and Mikati, who is also in charge of forming a new government.

Aoun told parliament in a letter that Mikati was "uninterested" in forming a new cabinet to deal with Lebanon's myriad problems and called on him to resign.

Many fear that an extended power vacuum could further delay attempts to finalize a deal with the International Monetary Fund that would provide Lebanon with some $3 billion in assistance, widely seen as a key step to help the country climb out of a three-year financial crisis that has left three quarters of the population in poverty.

While it's not the first time that Lebanon's parliament has failed to appoint a successor by the end of the president's term, this will be the first time that there will be both no president and a caretaker cabinet with limited powers.

Lebanon's constitution allows the cabinet in regular circumstances to run the government, but is unclear whether that applies to a caretaker government.

Constitutional expert Wissam Lahham said that "what Aoun is doing is unprecedented" since Lebanon adopted its constitution in 1926.

Under Lebanese law, a government that has resigned continues in a caretaker role until a new one is formed, Lahham said, describing Aoun's decree as "meaningless".

The president's powers fall to the Council of Ministers if he leaves office without a successor. A cabinet in a caretaker role cannot, however, take important decisions that might impact the country's fate, Lahham said.

Lahham told The Associated Press that in his view, the governance issues the country will face are political rather than legal.

Although the constitution "doesn't say explicitly that the caretaker government can act if there is no president, logically, constitutionally, one should accept that because the state and institutions should continue to function according to the principle of the continuity of public services," he said.

Lawmaker Ghassan Hasbani of the Lebanese Forces, the FPM's Christian rivals, said that Aoun had dealt an additional blow to the country's paralyzed state institutions by signing the decree.

"The government will now operate only within the narrowest of caretaker scopes," Hasbani said, while parliament can no longer meet to legislate, only to vote on a new president.

"We are faced with a vacuum at the executive level and paralysis of the legislative body."

Talks between Lebanon's government and the IMF that began in May 2020 and reached a staff-level agreement in April have made very little progress.

The Lebanese government has implemented few of the IMF's demands from the agreement, which are mandatory before finalizing a bailout program. Among them are restructuring Lebanon's ailing financial sector, implementing fiscal reforms, restructuring external public debt and putting in place strong anti-corruption and anti-money laundering measures.

"The prospects of an IMF deal were already dim before the upcoming power vacuum and departure of Aoun," said Nasser Saidi, an economist and former Minister of Economy. "There is no political will or appetite for undertaking reforms."

"Aoun's departure is simply another nail in the coffin," he said. "It does not change the fundamentals of a dysfunctional failed state and totally ineffective polity."