Joseph Aoun’s Easter speech was meant to sound presidential. It did. It carried the register of sovereignty, diplomacy, restraint, the careful language of a head of state navigating a war he did not start and cannot end. He spoke of negotiation. He gestured, without naming, at those who made decisions that cost Lebanon dearly. He performed, with some skill, the role of a president.
The problem is not what he said. The problem is what that performance has consistently cost those of us who dared to say it differently.
For months, anyone who questioned the approach, the tone, the strategy, the silences, the indirections, was handed a familiar accusation: traitor. Defeatist. Enemy of sovereignty. The accusation does not need to be spoken loudly to land. It circulates in the ecosystem around the presidency, in the commentary of supporters, in the framing of criticism as disloyalty. Disagree with the method, and you are repositioned as someone who disagrees with Lebanon itself.
This is not a new tactic in Lebanese politics. It is, in fact, the oldest one. But it is worth naming precisely because Aoun arrived carrying a different expectation. He was not a warlord recycled into a suit. He was not a sectarian baron trading favors for loyalty. He came with the language of the state, of institutions, of a Lebanon that might finally mean something beyond the sum of its factions. That expectation made the silencing sharper when it came.
Because here is what the Easter speech quietly confirmed: the presidency still cannot speak directly to the Lebanese people about the things that matter most. It can signal internationally. It can phrase criticism so carefully that it becomes deniable. It can ask, rhetorically, what the decision to go to war gave anyone, and then watch as the supporters of that war react with fury, proving that everyone understood the target even when the target was never named.
That reaction is itself the argument. If indirect critique produces direct retaliation, there is no neutral ground available to the Lebanese state. The space for honest public communication has been closed, not only by Hezbollah’s sensitivity, not only by the sectarian arithmetic of Lebanese politics, but also by a presidency that never seriously worked to open it.
This is the accountability that is missing from the analysis of Aoun’s communication failures. Structural constraints are real. The Lebanese presidency does not command an army, does not hold a monopoly on violence, does not decide alone when wars begin or end. These are facts. But facts do not absolve. Because between the constraint and the silence, there were choices. There were moments to speak more honestly to a Lebanese public that was, and remains, desperate for a leader who treats them as adults. Those moments passed. And when citizens pointed to the passing, they were called traitors.
By now, the record is clear enough to say: we were not wrong to push. The communication failures were not inevitable. A president who cannot build a direct relationship with his own public, who navigates international diplomacy with more transparency than he shows his own citizens, has made a political choice. That choice has costs. Lebanon is carrying them.
The Easter speech will be read in some quarters as brave. In others as insufficient. In the international press maybe as measured and statesmanlike. What it will not be read as, in any quarter, is the speech of a president who has reckoned honestly with what his tenure has produced and what his approach has failed to do.
Lebanon does not need a president who performs sovereignty beautifully. It needs one who is willing to be held accountable for how that performance has served, or failed, the people watching it. Criticism is not treason. Dissent is not defeatism. And by now, after everything, a president who still cannot distinguish between the two has not learned the most important lesson his year in office had to teach.
Ramzi Abou Ismail is a Political Psychologist and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution at the Lebanese American University.
The views in this story reflect those of the author alone and do not necessarily reflect the beliefs of NOW.
