Finally! A President

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Ok, that was a joke. But This has become so common to Joke about this that even the otherwise sober Economist magazine is telling it:

Lebanon
A president at last?
May 1st 2008 | BEIRUT

Just kidding

THE bold headline on flyers that appeared last month in the capital, Beirut, declared all of Lebanon’s problems resolved. The country’s myriad bickering sects, parties and warlords had called a truce, agreeing unanimously to elect a new president and join a broad coalition government with a sweeping mandate for reform. Parliament, reconvening for the first time in 17 months, had voted to abolish sectarian discord and to hold fresh elections under a new, fairer electoral law.

Needless to say, that was an April Fool’s prank—and nothing has changed since. Lebanon’s prospects have seldom looked worse since the end of the country’s ruinous civil war of 1975-90. In the past two years its main factions have become polarised between increasingly hostile camps, leaving the state officially headless since last November. This has paralysed parliament and turned this tiny country, prone to assassinations, into what many Lebanese see as a boxing ring where bigger regional contestants, such as Iran, Syria, America and Saudi Arabia, can parade their proxies.

There are reports of a surge in gun sales, as militias rearm in the expectation of renewed strife. Rising prices, a brain drain to calmer places and fears of another clash between the guerrilla forces of the Shia movement, Hizbullah, and Israel, which fought a month-long war in 2006, all increase the jitters.

Yet the bitter irony of the April Fool’s pranksters—and their bemused detachment—is appropriate. Beirut wags who bemoan their country’s “electile dysfunction” can point to its thriving nightlife and a boom in luxury buildings going up. Last year the economy grew by a respectable 4%. A rating agency, Moody’s, recently upgraded Lebanon from negative to stable, noting an “impressive resilience of public finances in the face of numerous political shocks”. Fears of a currency collapse have evaporated, thanks to big pledges of foreign aid and the gentle decline of the dollar, to which the Lebanese pound is conveniently pegged. The central bank sits on a hoard of gold bullion worth an estimated $8.5 billion, equal to one-third of the country’s GDP.

The Lebanese can also count on their buoyant joie de vivre. Those who despair of the country’s real politics, for instance, can act out the role of top sectarian bosses online. A new computer game, called Douma (Puppets), allows players to take control of a politician, and punch and kick his way to the presidency. And there is always the example of Jeanette Feghaly, better known as Sabah, a perennially blonde singer and film star who first took to the stage in 1943, the year of Lebanon’s independence. Now 81, the eternal Sabah has recently married her eighth husband.

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© 2009 The Beirut Spring, a Lebanese Blog.