Musical Cabinet Chairs

The only thing worse than when one party acts as judge, jury and executioner is when ALL parties act as judge, jury and executioner, and this seems to be what's going on in Lebanon. Prime Minister designate Fouad Sanioura is trying to come up with a cabinet that satisfies everybody, and no one's making it any easier for him. Both sides just keep making up rules as they go along based on nothing but their own agenda.

- Michel Aoun, for some reason, claims he has the right to a "sovereign" portfolio, and spent five weeks arguing about that until he was offered the Vice-Premiership.
- Geagea, whose parliamentary block about four times smaller than that of Aoun, seems to think he has as much rights as Aoun to the point of actually saying, "If Aoun gets a sovereign portfolio, I want one too!"
- Sleiman Franjieh seems to think that the PM designate has no right to reject any of the names suggested by the opposition, including Ali Kanso who is hated by pretty much all of Sanioura's constituancy.
- Then there's Sanioura himself who doesn't seem to care much about his current constitutional role as (a) a resigned Prime Minister with no executive powers "except in the narrow sense of managing affairs", and (b) a Prime Minister designate with no executive powers until his new cabinet gets a parliamentary confidence. So he goes around making Prime Ministerly decisions and statements in between his talks with rival politicians.
- Finally there's Emile Lahoud who, in his capacity as Former President, seems to think, along with many others, that he has the right to set deadlines for the new cabinet formation.

The way I see it, the rules are quite simple. The constitution states that the PM, along with the President, forms the cabinet, and the Parliament gives it confidence. The Doha accord added the constraint that opposition gets 11 seats in the cabinet. So as far as I'm concerned, if you put these two together, the opposition should just play nice and agree to any 11 seats. But of course, the problem now isn't that the opposition doesn’t accept the portfolios given to them, but that they seem to have taken so many, that the March 14 majority can't figure out how to share the rest. Seems that no matter how you flip it, there's always one seat missing... Kind of like a really messed up game of Musical Chairs.

But finally, what I really don't get is: Why is this such a big deal? The elections are in ten to eleven months anyway and if the President gets the Interior Ministry (which oversees the elections), does anyone really care who gets telecommunications or infrastructure? Do all Lebanese politicians think they're so important that the country would collapse if the Economy, Finance or the Labor portfolios were run by someone else for a year?