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The Lebanese presidential race is heating up with now two front running candidates, and with Gebran Bassil the leader of the Free patriotic Movement Party choosing to back Jihad Azour.
The move came to end all speculation that Bassil might back Franjieh’s candidacy and keep aligning himself to an extent with the march 8 camp. Although lots of talk was surfacing during the “dead time” before Bassil declaring his candidate, mainly focused around the price that bassil was asking in order to go with Franjieh, this possibility would have been for Bassil out of the question from the very beginning.
Lots of reasons should and have made the final desicion for Bassil an obvious one.
First and foremost the deep disdain every supporter of his party has for the Head of the Marada party, ever since he tried to get himself elected ahead of Michel aoun who would get eventually elected after almost a year in 2016, the FPM supporters feel like they were betrayed by Franjieh who in their view should be predominantly backing Aoun as the prime an only candidate of the March 8 alliance and see him as an intruder to the race back then.
Franjieh has done nothing to mitigate this distaste over president’s aoun term and never tried to reconcile with their populous as well as the heads of the free patriotic movement, he even went further as to relentlessly attack them in the media and in lots of political rallies held, going as far as saying one time in a political rally that “Mussolini is better then Aoun because he murdered his son in law”, in a reference to Gebran Bassil who is the son in law of the then president Aoun.
Therefore for the populous of FPM it would be a huge mishap to even think about contributing indirectly to electing franjieh as president.