The desperation of Zebran Basij, the poor wretched ally of the Iranian militia in Lebanon, Hezbollah, has reached a crescendo. He is running around like a headless chicken, traveling the world begging for forgiveness and for lifting of the US sanctions, visiting with Patriarch Rahi to try and lift his sagging Christian popularity, threatening his own Hezbollah ally with "You have your weapons, but we have our existence" [See: https://lebanoniznogood.blogspot.com/2022/12/bassil-to-hezbollah-your-weapons-vs-our.html], and like a schoolboy who was caught with his pants down, telling the Maronite Patriarch on his Christian rival Samir Geagea of the Lebanese Forces Party that the latter does not want dialogue.
"Dialogue" is the term used by the Muslims of this country to bypass holding democratic elections of the Christian President and instead engage in "dialogue". Which means, find a Christian eunuch with no popular backing to place like a dummy in the presidential palace in Baabda and abuse him or her for the next 6 years.
Basij has so far sided with the Muslims in refusing to vote, breaking the quorum in Parliament, dropping blank votes etc... all strategies intended to avoid holding a simple vote according to the constitutional requirements (in a 1st round by a 2/3d majority, and failing this in an immediate 2nd round with a 51% majority). Having held his side of the satanic bargain with Hezbollah for years, Basij expected Hezbollah to nominate him as a presidential candidate. But the Iranian militia believes it has held its side of the bargain by imposing Michel Aoun in 2016, and does not feel obligated to do the same with Zebran Basijin 2022. Instead, it has now chosen Sleiman Frangiyeh, who is very close to the Syrian butcher Bashar Assad next door in Damascus, and who will likely do Hezbollah's bidding by not challenging it on its unlawful militia which everyone else want dismantled.
The second backstab by Hezbollah against the idiot Basij was last Monday when caretaker Prime Minister Miqati held a cabinet meeting, something that Basij, in his acrimonious crusade for Christian rights in Lebanon, called to boycott. As he says, absent a Christian President (whose election Basij himself has been blocking in Parliament), the Sunni Prime Minister cannot abscond with the presidential prerogatives. But his Hezbollah allies did attend the cabinet meeting and, worse, they signed off on a decree that did not even have a space for the President to sign. Instead, the decree was signed twice by Miqati, once as Prime Minister and a second time also as Prime Minister. The term "President of the Republic" wasn't even typed on the paper. An affront to Christian rights, according to Basij.
The stalemate as expected is turning into a sectarian battle between Christians and Muslims. Basij thought he could play the Shiite Muslims against the Sunni Muslims, and that seemed to work for a while. But the Shiite Hezbollah (and its other Shiite ally, Speaker of Parliament Nabih Berri) seems now to be siding with the Sunnis in blocking Parliament from electing an independent-minded Christian President, and running the country without a Christian President at the helm.
Over the past three decades, since the 1989 Taef Agreement that castrated the Christian President of his authority and transferred it to the Sunni Prime Minister, the Muslims of the country had gotten used to running the country, especially under the Syrian occupation (1976-2005). With the Syrians gone, the Muslims are having a hard time accepting a return "en force" of the Christians by, for example, allowing a non-puppet Christian president to lead. That is why the Muslims are calling for "dialogue" and for a "consensus" president, instead of a real democratic battle that could bring a president who might stand up to Hezbollah and its Iranian weapons.
Problem for Basij is that he wants his cake and eat it too. On one hand, he has in the past, and is today, still trying to use Hezbollah to remain afloat while his own popularity is in free fall in the Christian street (as the last May legislative elections showed), yet he cannot fathom why Hezbollah wouldn't want him as its presidential candidate. And now he is upset at Hezbollah's double betrayal. The 2006 Memorandum of Understanding between Basij and Hezbollah is, for all practical purposes, dead, and their divorce is under way.
It might be that, in the back of Basij's mind, he sees the theocracy in Iran imploding in the near term, and with it Hezbollah's might. Perhaps, Basij is trying to make up for his unnatural alliance with Hezbollah by positioning himself as a centrist, as a not-so-much-pro-Hezbollah Christian so he can wash his dirty hands off and recoup some popularity among Lebanon's Christians.
The coming few weeks are likely to give us the answer. My opinion is that Basij is finished, at least for a while, on the Lebanese political scene. He surfed on his father-in-law (Michel Aoun)'s popularity for close to 20 years. With Aoun gone, his is facing alone the real test of his political savvy. He inherited his lieutenants from the Aoun cadres of the early years of his Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), and their attrition continues. His running around in desperation with no allies left presents him as a disgruntled, incompetent, and weak politician who has done more harm than good to Christian rights in Lebanon.
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