Unlike Jacques Chirac of France, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Ehud Olmert of Israel and other presidents, no head of a municipality in Lebanon has moved on to a senior-level national government position, let alone the presidency. Today, more than two years into the Lebanese presidential void, could the recent municipal elections ironically lead to the election of a president of the republic.

Between May 8 and May 29, Lebanon conducted four phase municipal elections that engaged Lebanese voters in some 1,015 municipalities, in cities, towns and villages. This figure alone explains the intense mobilization surrounding the elections, which included more than 30,000 candidates. Further heightening mobilization efforts was that the elections were held almost three years after the cancellation of parliamentary elections and the parliament’s extension of its mandate as its term ended in June 2013. Longing to cast their votes amid the mobilization generated by the municipal elections, the Lebanese turned the implications of this milestone into indicators that cannot be overlooked: that it is possible to hold elections in Lebanon today and that the traditional parties and forces face a crisis among their popular bases.

The May balloting dispatched with the political and security pretexts, mainly spillover from the Syrian war, that some members of parliament — including those affiliated with the Future Movement, Amal and Hezbollah — had invoked in seeking to cancel two consecutive, mandated parliamentary elections. None of the pretexts were convincing or accurate. What’s more, some legal experts argue that merely holding municipal elections has effectively in a legal, constitutional sense made the case behind the extension of the current parliament invalid.

Ziad Baroud, the former interior minister and a lawyer competent in electoral and constitutional law, told Al-Monitor, “When the parliament extended its own term a second time [on Nov. 5, 2014], the members of parliament who were against the extension — mainly parliamentarians from the Change and Reform Bloc — challenged the decision before the Constitutional Council of Lebanon, which is the highest judicial authority authorized to decide on the constitutionality of laws. On Nov. 28 of that same year, the Constitutional Council issued a decision whereby the extension of the parliament’s term could occur as government authorities thought that holding elections would not be possible in Lebanon amid the security situation prevailing at the time [mainly because of the Syrian war].