Nawwaf Salam is, depending on your level of cynicism, either cautious, overly cautious, paralyzingly cautious, or just a guy who triple-checks the expiration date on bottled water. And let’s be clear: in Lebanon, these are not just virtues; they’re survival skills. Because when it comes to former Lebanese prime ministers, the choices have ranged from reckless to cowardly, from charmingly neutral to aggressively idiotic, from historically irrelevant to so politically flexible they might as well be made of Play-Doh.
A Lebanese prime minister, post-Taif and minus a Syrian overlord, is basically a guy walking barefoot across a floor of broken glass while being asked to juggle grenades. Sure, he’s got responsibilities—just not much power. Every minister is a “sovereign” in their own fiefdom, and getting enough of them to agree on anything is like herding cats. Drunk, armed, and deeply sectarian cats.
Back to Salam, who now has the Herculean task of forming a cabinet—preferably one capable of standing up to Lebanon’s political class, that long-entrenched club of rent-seekers, double-dealers, and professional foot-draggers. These are people who treat government formation like a high-stakes poker game, except they never risk their own chips—just the country’s future. They will, of course, claim that they are merely defending their “underprivileged communities” from existential threats, economic hardships, or an international conspiracy that, coincidentally, always seems to target their personal bank accounts.
So, what must Salam do? For starters, he needs to avoid forming yet another carbon copy of the post-Taif cabinets—those glorified waiting rooms for foreign emissaries. At the same time, he must resist the urge to assemble a government that looks like the faculty lounge at the American University of Beirut. A cabinet full of well-meaning, honest technocrats sounds great—until you realize that a government isn’t a TED Talk. A good heart surgeon doesn’t necessarily know how to run a healthcare system. An oil and gas expert might understand extraction, but what Lebanon needs is someone who can actually get power plants built, preferably before the country runs out of candles.
Salam’s ideal cabinet? People who are knowledgeable but not narrow-minded, politically competent but not partisan hacks. Then he should throw this lineup at Parliament and see what happens. If they approve, great. If they reject it, even better—because then he becomes caretaker PM, and in Lebanon, the guy in a “temporary” position often has more room to maneuver than the official officeholder. He could use this time to clean out the Augean stables of Lebanon’s ministries, deal with real governance, and—crucially—get backing from the same international players who put Joseph Aoun and him in place to begin with.
And if all else fails? Well, being a judge doesn’t sound so bad. At least in court, people pretend to respect the law.