The meeting that recently brought together Christian parties at the seat of the Maronite Church in Bkerke is regarded by a leader of the anti-Hezbollah sovereign circle as an attempt to float Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) leader Gebran Bassil, a former ally of the Iran-backed party.
Pointing to Bassil’s recent speech in which he positioned himself in the middle, halfway between the so-called “resistance axis” led by Hezbollah and the opposition, the Christian leader demanded that the FPM chief openly declare his stance about Hezbollah’s weapons.
He asked “Is he (Bassil) for it or against it? Is he in favor of removing the weapons and handing them over to the army in implementation of international resolutions, especially 1559, or not?”
Bassil is trying to develop the concept of the “centrist axis” after he deemed that the “Shiite duo” (Amal and Hezbollah) is not in a rush to elect a president of the republic.
The two Shiite parties are obviously seeking to extend the presidential void in order to achieve gains, the least of which is to win recognition of the three-way power-sharing equation that was agreed upon in Doha verbally, but never acknowledged in a written agreement. They actually want to change the equation consecrated in the Taif accord from equal sharing of power between Muslims and Christians to one that is shared between the President, a Christian, the Prime Minister, a Sunni, and the Parliament Speaker, a Shiite.
