Representative Ashraf Rifi launched a sharp attack on some Hezbollah officials, considering that they had “crossed all red lines in their political discourse” after they had reached, in his words, the point of “insulting the President of the Republic, General Joseph Aoun, and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam,” in a scene that, according to him, reflects the insistence on dealing with the Lebanese state “with a mentality of guardianship and arrogance.”
Rifi said, in a post on the “X” platform, that this speech “no longer intimidates anyone, but rather reveals the extent of the crisis experienced by those who refuse to acknowledge that the time of imposing wills by force of arms has ended irrevocably.”
He added: “The time in which you controlled the state and imposed your choices on it by force of arms and intimidation has ended,” considering that the region has changed, and many bets have fallen, while the Iranian project that the party has bet on for decades has declined, noting that the countries of the region are moving towards consolidating state authority and ending militia projects and hegemony, and that what is happening in Iraq represents a clear model of these transformations, stressing that Lebanon will not remain outside this path.
Rifi accused the party of trying to evade responsibility for the collapse, considering that the Lebanese “know very well who obstructed the constitution, who confiscated the national decision, who involved Lebanon in other people’s wars, who imposed Arab and international isolation on it, and who provided protection for the system of corruption, waste, and illegal weapons,” stressing that these facts “will not be erased by campaigns of arrogance or attempts to reverse the facts.”
He stressed that “the era of guardianship over the Lebanese state has ended and will not return,” considering that “betting on weapons to impose political equations has become an illusion,” because the Lebanese, as he put it, “have made their choice: one state, one army, one weapon, and one authority governed by the constitution and the law.”
Rifi concluded by saying that the party “misread Lebanon, misread the region, and is wrong today in reading the future,” considering that “whoever does not learn from the lessons of history and does not acknowledge the facts dooms himself to becoming part of the past, while Lebanon is moving forward, despite all the difficulties, towards restoring its state, sovereignty, and free decision.”
