... but it's not yet out of control

Well, you read it here first! The Presidential election is indeed going down to the wire. Talks have been going on for the last 48 hours - a combination of telephone calls from European Foreign Ministers to various faction leaders here, faction leaders speaking to each other on the phone and faction leaders popping round to each others' houses for chit chats and negotiations. It's been a real social whirl!

So, the latest seems to be that no one has agreed on a list of candidates from which a President can be chosen. In fact, the MPs seem to be bypassing the list stage now, and are just focusing on who will be President. Just as well, as at the time of writing it's only 13.5 hours until Lahoud has to step down. Naturally he's been making noises as well about how he'll do 'something extraordinary' if he doesn't have a replacement.

Aoun, one of the candidates for President (biggest fan, himself), tried to engineer a breakthrough last night by issuing a compromise set of proposals which would have him nominate a President (not himself) and Hariri nominate a PM (not Hariri). There were other demands in this list, some reasonable, some less so to the majority in government, and the proposals were unceremoniously thrown out. So we wait. The opposition aren't going to Parliament today to elect a new President, but the majority are, although without any candidates in the frame at the moment, goodness knows what will happen.

One possibility is that in the absence of any agreement, General Michel Suleiman, head of the army, will step in as President temporarily. The army does enjoy support from both sides, and is generally well respected by the Lebanese population. Although not ideal, this measure might buy some time and stability.

Finally, in my last post, I referred to an RPG being outside the local coffee shop. Obviously I didn't mean that there was a Rocket Propelled Grenade in the vicinity, I meant to write Armoured Personnel Carrier (APC). Slight mistype there!!