Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Hezbollah does not want Aoun or anyone else as Lebanon president

Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea exposed Hezbollah’s real intensions on Wednesday by stressing that the party does not want presidential elections in the current period or the election as president of its main Christian ally, Free Patriotic Movement founder MP Michel Aoun.
“At the strategic level, Hezbollah cannot coexist with a real state in Lebanon … and at the tactical level Hezbollah does not want General Aoun as president, although it cannot afford to lose him, which has pushed it to obstruct the presidential vote,” Geagea said in an interview with Russia Today (RT) TV.
“This way it does not lose Aoun and it postpones the problem indefinitely ,” Geagea added.
On Monday, Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah accused the LF of seeking to stir a dispute between Hezbollah and the FPM.
“If we head to parliament, it is known that  Aoun will not be elected,” Nasrallah noted, dismissing LF calls in this regard.
“Our relation with (Speaker Nabih) Berri is not based on coercion and we are ethically committed to supporting Aoun’s nomination,” Nasrallah added.
The Lebanese parliament failed again on March 23 and for the 37th time in a row to elect a president to replace Michel Suleiman whose term ended on May 25 , 2014.
As in the past sessions the parliament was unable to reach a quorum because the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group and its ally Aoun’s Change and Reform bloc MPs boycotted the session, because they could not guarantee Aoun’s election as a president