The negotiations to form a government cabinet in Lebanon provide an example of the position held by citizens in political life. Indeed, after more than five months since he was designated to form a cabinet, the Prime Minister designate has not condescended to address his voters and provide a reasonable explanation of the reasons behind the prolonged standstill. Many a “decisive week” has gone by, rates of optimism have risen then fallen, trust was built with parties in the opposition, and gone are the regional hindrances that prevented agreeing over the names, deeds and portfolios of ministers, as claimed by supporters of the parliamentary majority. Nevertheless, all of this and even more has not cleared the dark cloud and brought the cabinet forth from the realm of ideas. As for the voters, who were called upon, on a June day long ago, to say through the ballot boxes what majority parties have sought to say in their campaigns over four years, they receive neither standing nor consideration. The votes of electors are not a mandate that can be dismissed, according to what they should be in the electoral mores and laws of the world, but are rather a delegation of power to persons of authority to act as they see fit and know to be best. And in the vast majority of cases, what they see and know is so scarce and meager that it gives them no chance to act on the basis of the basics of the democratic process, which all state that authority comes from the people, i.e. voters. And instead of turning to voters and urging them to demand their right to be properly represented in the government cabinet, the prime instrument of power, majority leaders have started playing by the rules of their adversaries. And since demands that had formed the basis of the movement of “sovereignty and independence” have been retracted for the purpose of maintaining civil peace, as in the case of not addressing issues of weapons and defense strategy, or in other words ceasing to seek the right of the state to be a state, it is no longer unusual for the majority to accept formulas that take away its “majority”, the likes of the obstructing one-third, alternation in sovereign portfolios, and the details that follow in the same vein. One might say that Walid Jumblatt's “U-turn” has deprived the majority of its dynamics and moved the crisis to its core, that the Prime Minister designate seems as if he had been “beaten up”, and that political alliances in Lebanon have become more characterized by confusion and fluctuation than any similar relationships between political parties and movements anywhere in the vast world, for reasons that regard Lebanon's sectarian structure. The truth of such words does not refute the fact that the way the negotiations to form a government cabinet are being managed, which has led to Saad Hariri stepping down then being designated once again to form the government, has revealed the frailty of majorities and minorities, and of the way they take shape in a sectarian environment the tendencies of which are known without the elections and before them, in addition to the futility of looking for a way out of a sealed and impossible political system. In this sense, the majority neglecting its supporters and ignoring the possibility of turning to them and gathering them in a battle for which the slogan of “preserving the electoral victory” might be appropriate – after having mobilized them in battles about which it would not be exaggerate to say that their slogans and justifications were much less important – would not just be behavior resulting from a certain type of arrogant and condescending political practice becoming established (which is by definition the opposite of the claimed democracy), but also the result of the attainment of the formula which the Lebanese deigned to agree over in Taif, one which has become a thing of the past before having witnessed its complete implementation. Whether today witnesses the formal inauguration of proceedings to form the government cabinet or whether the anticipated achievement gets delayed for several more months; neither this nor that negates how difficult it is to live with a political system that is not coupled with the fluidity of Lebanon's political society, one which to begin with lacks mechanisms that would ensure its development and would grant it immunity against God-given “rights”.
