DSG said it himself…he is not interested, at the current time, in the presidency… 

And this was not a set of empty words, nor because he is afraid his past will catch up with him…for any one who does not know Hakim, the man has nothing to be ashamed of from all of his past…I don’t want to sound like a press agent for him, but compared to many political leaders on the scene or aspiring to come to the scene, Samir is among the very few who can be proud of the stances they took…from the intifada of 1984 to that of 1986…also, many choose to ignore the great changes he brought about to the LF between 1986 and 1988 like Social Security (ta3adod ijtima3i) and Common Transportations to name a few…all these are nothing but positive points in his favor… 

The man is very smart knows very well he has a long way to go before he can think of running for the post… 

For one, he has an enormous task ahead of him which is the, I’m not going to say reorganization…I prefer to use the word stabilization of the Lebanese Forces: After he went to jail, things kinda got out of control…splinter groups formed and the LFs (notice the plural form) you have today are very far away from the LF that started out in the old days…So in that sense, Hakim is doing all he can to get the job done, to correct in the best possible way the errors committed while he was absent…and the different groups antagonizing him is not helping any but that’s another topic… 

Then you should not to forget that the Syrian occupation did all it could to marginalize the Christian political role during its 15 years of occupation…in a sense, Hakim is fighting an uphill battle to regain some of the political turf lost by the Christians during the occupation 

Add to this the current situation of the country…and worse the current situation of the Lebanese Christians…a hundred divisions…new parties mushrooming left and right…backstabbing, deceit…hardly a stable state and hardly a ground to build a solid country on…  

As for his political alliances, what many of his criticizers fail to see is that unlike others, he has not changed his stance…it was his allies that came to him and not him to them…whether we like it or not, this country is made up of the different sects…so we will have to work with them in order to achieve a country…and the current leaders of these sects, although they raise many an eyebrow amongst certain Christians, are the only ones on the scene that have a strong popular backing from their respective sects and that have decided to embrace our cause… 

So in my opinion, Hakim is climbing the ladder step by step…slowly maybe but surely… from my knowledge of him, he is not a seeker of the presidency for the title or for the prestige… he knows very well that, in the post Taef Lebanon, the presidency is almost a ceremonial post…and he does not need to have his hands tied once again.