Qifa Nabki
Michel Aoun
Aoun and the Future
A couple of years ago, shortly before the end of President Michel Sleiman’s term in office, I wrote an essay asking why Lebanon needed a President, given the relative powerlessness of the position. Here’s the payoff paragraph: Twenty-five years after Ta’if inaugurated Lebanon’s Second Republic and nearly nine years after the Syrian departure gave us a new, mysterious set … Continue reading
Of FreeCell and Phone Chargers: A Lebanese Parable
Lebanese politics often resembles a game of FreeCell to me. Or, for the millennials among us: 2048, which I often catch my students playing on their phones before class begins. For long stretches, the board is locked down. There is an occasional opening, a small shift in the grid, but it comes to nothing. Hardly anything moves for several rounds … Continue reading
The Lebanese Presidency, Twenty-Five Years after Ta’if
Lebanon failed to elect a president this week, but the failure was rather dignified by recent standards. Unlike the 2008 election — preceded by twenty months of government paralysis, public demonstrations, a parliament building locked by its Speaker, and several high-profile assassinations — it was a relief to watch 124 parliamentarians show up at the Chamber of Deputies last Wednesday and cast their votes. Most … Continue reading
A Questionable Strategy
It didn’t take long for OTV and al-Akhbar to point out the same inconsistencies that I noticed in Okab Sakr’s testimony last week, and release responses comparing the segments “added” by Sakr to the original clips that they had published. (See here for the OTV clip; al-Akhbar‘s most recent response can be found here.) Even if there is … Continue reading
March in Support of Proportional Representation
I got an email about a planned march in support of proportional representation (PR), which will take place in Beirut on May 13. In a way, conditions are ripe these days for Lebanese civil society groups to push their agenda for electoral reform because: (a) the issue is front and center again, and (b) because … Continue reading
Qifa Nabki 
And the people say…