Bashar al-Assad’s boyhood friend is on the path to becoming the next President of Lebanon

Sleiman Frangieh, a close personal friend of embattled Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad, is increasingly looking like he will be the next President of Lebanon.

Lebanese politicians appear to be making progress on a deal that would end the 18-month stalemate over who would be the next President. Future Movement leader and former Prime Minister Sa’ad Hariri shocked observers by endorsing Sleiman Frangieh, leader of the Marada Movement and previously a staunch opponent of Hariri’s.

Under the National Pact, which divides political power among the main religious sects in Lebanon, the President must be a Maronite Christian and the Prime Minister a Sunni. The President is elected by the parliament. The last president, General Michel Sleiman, left office in May 2014, and since then no single candidate has been able to patch together enough votes to become President, and proposals to extend Sleiman’s term (as had been done with his predecessor Emile Lahoud, albeit under the direction of the occupying Syrians) were shot down.

Parliamentary elections have had to be repeatedly postponed as well, because a President needs to be elected first, according to the constitution.

Whereas Sleiman was seen as a decidedly independent candidate who could be a unifying force for Lebanon, Frangieh is the opposite. He was close friends with Bashar’s older brother, Bassel (his younger son is named for him), and regularly speaks and visits with Bashar, who Frangieh has said is like a “brother.” Frangieh spent much of his younger years in Syria after his father, Tony, was assassinated by rival a rival Maronite militia.

He offered his full support for the Assad regime early on in the Syrian Civil War, and is a close political ally of Hezbollah. So enthusiastic is his support of Hezbollah that he even remarked that his generation was lucky to be “living in the days of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah.”

Peculiar Politics

The endorsement of his candidacy by Sa’ad Hariri is one of the more curious moments in recent Lebanese political history. Hariri, whose own father Rafic was assassinated, has (like many) blamed Syria and Hezbollah for the murder. Syria issued an arrest warrant for Hariri in 2012 based on accusations of giving weapons and money to Syrian rebels, and he responded by saying that Assad has “all the characteristics of a monster,” and that he had lost the “moral, humanitarian, and political authority [to rule] and he will sooner or later stand before the justice wanted by the Syrian people.”

He is also the leader of the March 14 Movement, which pushed to end the 30-year Syrian occupation of Lebanon. The March 14 Movement includes the Lebanese Forces, a Maronite party led by Samir Geagea, who is widely believed to have led the attack that killed Frangieh’s father.

Strange bedfellows indeed. Hariri’s dramatic about-face has led many to speculate what he is getting out of backing Frangieh.

He has been living in exile in Saudi Arabia since he was forced from office in 2011 when his national unity government collapsed after Hezbollah-aligned parties, including Frangieh’s Marada Movement, backed out when it became expected that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon would indict Hezbollah members for the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri.

Most rumors point towards Hariri being offered a return from exile and becoming Prime Minister once again in return for supporting Frangieh’s candidacy.

Frangieh has also reportedly been able to secure the support of Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader of the Progressive Socialist Party who, like Hariri, has been a vocal opponent of the Assad regime during the civil war. However, Jumblatt’s nickname “The Weathervane” isn’t in reference to his aquiline nose, but to his tendency to move in whatever direction the political winds are blowing, so backing Frangieh wouldn’t be nearly as shocking as Hariri’s decision.

Old, Bad Blood

With two major possible opponents looking like they will be behind him, Frangieh looks like a serious candidate for the presidency. His most fierce opposition looks to be out of his own corner, from other Lebanese Maronites. This shouldn’t be surprising, though, considering how much bad blood there is among the main clans.

Sami Gemayel, leader of the Kataeb party and son of former president Amine Gemayel, has said that Frangieh must distance himself from the Assad regime. “We are being clear,” he declared, “if Frangieh sets aside his political affiliations, then we will have no veto against him. We have no personal veto against him.”

“We will not give our votes to any nominee that has a political rhetoric that only represents one side of the Lebanese…The head of state should represent all the Lebanese.”

Many in Hariri’s March 14 Movement had been looking to back Lebanese Forces candidate Samir Geagea who, as noted before, is implicated in the attack that killed Frangieh’s father (and mother and sister). The attack was ordered by none other than the Gemayel family, as part of an ongoing inter-Maronite feud over rackets, turf, and the Frangieh’s growing ties with the regime of Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father. Tony Frangieh was infamously corrupt as a communications minister, and was said to be close friends with Rifaat Assad, Bashar’s uncle.

It is also worth noting that it was President Sleiman Frangieh, grandfather of the current presidential candidate, who invited the Syrians to intervene in the Lebanese Civil War in 1976, setting off a three-decade long occupation.

Another opponent of Frangieh’s is Michel Aoun, the preferred candidate of the Hezbollah-led March 8 Movement. His son-in-law, Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil, has indicated that his Free Patriotic Movement, which Aoun founded and handed over to Bassil, was still backing their old leader for President. Aoun, who rose to prominence in the 80s by fighting the Syrians before going to into exile in France after the Syrian military chased him out, has been a loyal friend of Hezbollah since returning in 2005, after the final Syrian withdrawal. They, in turn, have backed him as their primary choice for the president.

So, while the backing of Hariri and Jumblatt may be the start of a push that could actually make him president, Frangieh still faces many obstacles. Maronite Patriarch Beshara Rai has stepped in to try to mediate between the Christian parties, making way for some sort of reconciliation that would get them to agree on a candidate.

It Gets Even More Complicated

Support from Hariri, though, means support from Saudi Arabia, who are the main benefactor of Hariri and the March 14 Movement. French President Francois Hollande also recently spoke over the phone with Frangieh, a move that is being seen as at least tacit support for his candidacy. The United States will most likely follow the French, backing any possibility that would end the current political crisis.

If Frangieh’s presidential hopes are complicated due to his ties to the Assad regime and his opinions on the Civil War there, it is only a reflective of the greater strain the war has put on Lebanon in general. There are well over a million Syrian refugees in Lebanon now, ISIS has launched repeated attacks that have killed dozens, and the Lebanese military is engaged in ongoing operations against ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and their allies on the border with Syria and in cities like Tripoli. Frangieh’s staunchly pro-Assad stance may only bind Lebanon’s fate more closely to the civil war and invite more spillover from the fighting there.

Complications arising from the Syrian Civil War are not the only problems that Lebanon’s next president will have to address. The country can’t be said to move from crisis to crisis, because that would imply that the preceding crisis has been solved, or at least to some degree brought under control. No, Lebanon just adds another crisis to the never-shrinking pile of crises it has accumulated since, well, independence in 1943.

There is of course the famous trash crisis, now going on six-months old, which brought thousands onto the streets as part of the “You Stink” movement to protest the government’s inability to do something about Beirut’s mountains of garbage. Rainy winter weather is creating literal rivers of trash in the city, with some warning that a cholera outbreak is imminent.

There’s also the energy crisis, going on for decades, with the government unable to create a solution and get reliable, 24-hour a day electricity. Unreliable access to electricity has for years been hurting Lebanon’s economy, crippling prospects for development and progress.

And of course, no maelstrom of misery of this magnitude would be complete without a banking and finance crisis.

Perhaps the biggest crisis of all, though is a crisis of governance. Lebanon is cracking under the weight of a broken government. Refugees (not just Syrian), corruption, energy problems, rivers of trash, jihadist-Salafist terrorism from the likes ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and friends, Hezbollah dragging the country into wars against Israel and in Syria, all of these problems and more have exposed the Lebanese government as, at best, incompetent. At worst, it possesses an almost complete inability to govern, let alone govern effectively.

Which brings it all back to Sleiman Frangieh, who will have to perform a truly extraordinary tightrope act in order to get anything done. Not only will he have to balance the interests and conflicts of the entrenched sectarian powers, he will also have to deal with balancing the competing regional powers. An avowedly pro-Assad and pro-Hezbollah politician, he will not be able to just pander to them (and Russia and Iran, being their main backers), but will have to try to satisfy the other side, namely Saudi Arabia, France, and the United States.

Perhaps, if Frangieh was to become President and Hariri were to become Prime Minister, their odd-couple act could actually work. Maybe their partnership is just the sort of government that is needed to build a bridge between the March 8 and March 14 Movements and actually get some work done. The Lebanese know better than to get their hopes up, though.

Life just never seems to get easier for Lebanon.