It’s time for the Maronite political establishment to seriously consider whether the community benefits from retaining the post of president of the republic. Few things have damaged Maronite interests more than the sexennial race for the presidency, dividing the political class and injecting an element of the irrational into the thinking of communal politicians. As proof of this, today we have to helplessly watch while an octogenarian in dubious health has spent 18 months blocking the political process. The man refuses to allow any alternative to himself and is backed by a party that fears losing its strategic relationship with him. And all this while Lebanon is disintegrating economically, a process accelerated by the presence of well over a million Syrian refugees in the country.

But Michel Aoun is hardly alone. Across the Maronite spectrum are politicians who, even if they cannot seriously aspire to the presidency, are in a position to block the accession of someone else. Maronites will complain that the community is not united. That’s not always bad, but on the presidency pluralism is not desirable when its practical outcome is obstructionism.

Just as the presidency has launched a thousand ships of Maronite disputation, it has greatly lost its authority since the Taif Accord. While the last year and a half have shown how necessary is a president, Michel Sleiman’s term in office also confirmed that a president has very limited means to advance a particular national agenda, beyond the vital constitutional role he or she plays as “symbol of the nation’s unity.”

The problem with the presidency is that it has become so tied into the Maronite perception of the community’s health and status, that no one is thinking creatively anymore. The presidency has become a tattered security blanket, more an illusion than anything else. If Maronites were to lose the presidency, the argument goes, they would lose everything.

That’s highly unlikely. To this day the community laments the loss of presidential power because of Taif. Some political charlatans have convinced their partisans that they would seek to restore those powers, oblivious to the fact that if Sunnis and Shiites agree on one thing, it is in their refusal to reverse Taif in favor of the Maronite presidency. This would require that the prime minister and speaker of parliament surrender powers that they have spent almost three decades exercising.

If power matters, Maronites should consider the advantages of being prime minister or speaker. The most enduring politician of the postwar era is Nabih Berri, the speaker, who has been directing, and manipulating, parliament since 1992. As prime minister, Rafik Hariri, pushed forward a reconstruction project that, if nothing else, left a legacy that few Lebanese can deny.

It’s far more challenging to summarize the successes of Elias Hrawi, Emile Lahoud and Michel Sleiman. Lahoud’s singular achievement was to be so detested that Bashar Assad sought to extend his presidential term to spite the political class, setting in motion dynamics that, ultimately, ended with the Syrians withdrawing their army from Lebanon in 2005.

Hrawi did try to bring Lebanon back to normalcy after the war years, but to many Lebanese he will remain forever tarnished by the fact that he was entirely a Syrian creation. As for Sleiman, he left as he came, a somewhat futile figure adrift in a profoundly polarized political landscape.

This deficient record has pushed a number of Maronite politicians further into fantasyland, insisting that they alone can be a “strong” president. But what does strong mean when the constitutional limitations placed on the office are fairly clear? The post imposes subtlety, so that a president must work in the spaces left by the ambiguities of power. But it simply does not allow anyone to revive the long-lost spirits of a Camille Chamoun or Fouad Chehab. Either the Maronites must accept this reality, or consider alternative options for the community.

I recommend the latter. Taif calls for the deconfessionalization of the political system, and sooner or later this will return to haunt the Christians. The agreement also outlines the establishment of a Senate to maintain a confessional balance. There is no reason not to add an innovation to both these reforms, namely a rotation of the three major posts in the state, so that each of the three main communities alternates between the presidency, speakership of parliament and prime ministry.

What would be the advantages? After all, just as Maronites may bicker over the presidency, so too may they do so over the speakership of Parliament and prime ministry. And the same holds for the Sunni or Shiite communities over the presidency. That may well be true, but it is extremely difficult to block the election of a speaker or prime minister, since the consequences would be much more dramatic than the absence of a president.

Moreover, with the principle of rotation in place, different types of individuals would emerge as favorites for each post. One would have to be a parliamentarian to be speaker; a serious contender for the role of prime minister would have to earn a majority vote of confidence in Parliament, and his or her policies would be watered down by the reality that many Cabinet members will have different political loyalties. All this tends to benefit those adept at conciliation, while the rotation principle renders maneuvers to secure an unlawful extension difficult.

A rotation system would not resolve Lebanon’s problems, but it could inject flexibility into politics and force all sides to return to the principles of compromise. Above all it would force the pluralistic Maronite community to cut the Gordian Knot of the presidency which has proven so damaging to it. We may have another 18 months of stalemate to think about such an idea.