The June elections yielded a clear victory for the Western-aligned bloc led by Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri, and a loss for the alliance led by Hezbollah, the militant Shiite movement backed by Syria and Iran. But shifting regional realities, local power struggles, and the imperative of a coalition government prevented the parties from agreeing on a cabinet until now.

“I want a government that is true to Lebanon, and not to the image of political and sectarian discord that some see in us,” Mr. Hariri said as he announced the accord at the presidential palace on Monday night. He spoke of the need to focus on issues like anticorruption measures and administrative reform, on which there is widespread agreement.

Yet for all the relief surrounding its formation, the government will continue to face deep rifts that go to the heart of Lebanon’s still-unresolved identity, with one camp defining itself through resistance to Israel and the West, and the other aspiring to a more commercial and cosmopolitan role.

The new cabinet includes 15 seats for the majority led by Mr. Hariri, 10 for the Hezbollah-led opposition, and five for President Michel Suleiman, who has struggled to maintain neutrality. But because of the role of independent power brokers — including the wily Druse leader Walid Jumblatt, an ally of Mr. Hariri’s who distanced himself after the elections — the majority will have little chance to dictate the agenda.

That limitation could be a formula for further gridlock, especially on divisive issues like the international tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the father of the prime minister-designate.

Another volatile issue, Hezbollah’s arsenal, is not even up for discussion. When Saad Hariri’s allies appeared to challenge Hezbollah’s military prerogatives in May 2008, the group and its allies seized much of west Beirut, setting off the worst internal clashes since this country’s 15-year civil war. The violence was a bitter lesson, and led to a power-sharing agreement that enshrined a cabinet veto for Hezbollah and its allies.

The origins of the breakthrough that led to Monday’s announcement remain a mystery, since the basic power-sharing formula was agreed on months ago. Some say Syria, which long dominated Lebanon politically, had finally pushed its allies here to come to terms. But relations between Syria and Saudi Arabia, which have long vied for influence here, improved earlier this year, and many analysts believe that the two countries agreed not to interfere in the elections and their aftermath.

That, some say, was the problem. After so many years of taking political orders from abroad, Lebanon, with its weak and pliable institutions, may have lost the ability to forge a consensus on its own.

“When Syria and the Saudis ran Lebanon, the flexibility of the system was an asset because it enabled them to shape political power according to their needs,” said Elias Muhanna, a political analyst and author of the influential blog Qifa Nabki. “But now that Lebanon is more in charge of its own destiny, that flexibility has become a liability.”

Despite Hezbollah’s prominent role in Lebanon, the group had little part in the cabinet struggle, in keeping with its longstanding preference for exercising political power indirectly. Only 2 of the 10 opposition cabinet members belong to Hezbollah, and they are relatively marginal ones: those overseeing the ministries of agriculture and administrative reform.

Instead, much of the wrangling of recent months revolved around Hezbollah’s ally Michel Aoun, a former general who leads Lebanon’s largest Christian faction. Mr. Aoun insisted on keeping the telecommunications ministry, which has been held by his son-in-law since last year, and Mr. Hariri was reluctant to give it to him.

That struggle exemplified the way Lebanon’s petty power struggles can be hard to separate from broader ideological divides. There are natural reasons for Mr. Aoun’s interest in the telecommunications ministry, including the opportunity to carry out noteworthy reforms and, his critics say, the chance to reap sizable profits if the industry is privatized.

But Mr. Aoun’s rivals tend to see the shadow of Hezbollah behind his ambitions. Controlling telecommunications and surveillance is widely assumed to be crucial to the group’s military goals.

Mr. Hariri finally gave in last month and agreed to let Mr. Aoun have the telecommunications ministry. Mr. Aoun still held out for more. Soon afterward, two allies of Mr. Aoun made public comments expressing their frustration with him. Because the two allies are also strong allies of Syria, some believe that their comments signaled a decision by Syria to force an end to the long drama.

If so, Syria’s own diplomatic timetable may have been a factor. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, is planning to visit Paris next week, and some analysts here believe that he pushed his Lebanese allies to come to terms so that he could prove his usefulness to the French, whom he has been courting diplomatically for the past year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/world/middleeast/10lebanon.html?pagewanted=print

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