It's incidental to the main issues, but one lesson of the Greece crisis is that if you're going to have a president in a parliamentary system, it might be better to have the position directly elected by the people and disentangled from parliamentary procedures, as Ireland does. The current Greek political impasse began when the parliament couldn't elect a president, a decision forced prematurely by the former prime minister Antonis Samaras. One dimension of Lebanon's latest political drama is the inability of its parliament to elect a president. Parliamentary election of the president is a mechanism that hasn't served the eastern Mediterranean very well!
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