Saudi Arabia is a draw these days for the Lebanese, who are keeping an eye on the names of officials and politicians visiting the kingdom to offer their condolences for the death of King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz and to congratulate the new leadership. The Lebanese are monitoring the meetings taking place on the sidelines of this occasion, marking every emerging detail, in the hopes that it will pave the way for a possible rapprochement and solution to the crisis in their country.
Ever since the start of the presidential vacancy in Lebanon on May 25, 2014, the presidential crisis has been driven by several complex foreign and domestic reasons. Saudi Arabia has always featured prominently, either as among the parties facilitating the election of a new president or as a foreign party capable of facilitating and accelerating the process.
It should be noted that Riyadh, until the death of Abdullah on Jan. 23, always had two types of relationships with Lebanon. The first is more a close alliance with former head of the Lebanese government and leader of the Sunni majority, Saad Hariri, who, along with his family, holds Saudi nationality. The second is a tense relationship with Hezbollah, the first Shiite power in Lebanon and its surroundings. At times, this tension reached the point of direct and mutual public conflicts between the two sides. Somewhere between these two types, Riyadh’s relationship with the Lebanese Christian forces oscillated between friendship and estrangement, based on the positions of these forces on Hariri or Hezbollah and the distance between them and the two sides.
According to media reports that emerged several months ago, Saudi officials were behind the prevention of a then-imminent agreement between Hariri, and the parliamentary majority Christian leader Gen. Michel Aoun. The agreement was supposed to lead to the election of Aoun as president of the republic and the appointment of Hariri as prime minister. However, the deal was halted after a series of negotiations between the two men, directly disabling the Lebanese parliament from electing a new president. In the absence of any agreement between the two and their allies, it has become impossible to secure the constitutional quorum to convene parliament in the presidential election session.
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