On Thursday, Lebanon's President Michel Aoun announced that he had appointed former Prime Minister Saad Hariri as prime minister-designate. The move brings the veteran politician back on stage at a critical time as Lebanon is in a dire situation after previous attempts at forming a new government crumbled.

Long situated at the center of Lebanese politics, Hariri has been leading one of the biggest political blocs and served as prime minister twice in Lebanon. His return comes at the height of international scrutiny over where Lebanon is headed next.

With the country tormented by a longtime economic plight, the trauma left behind by Beirut's deadly explosion and a political system largely based on patronage networks, the prime minister-designate will have a lot on his shoulders.

But given the Lebanese people's past experience with Hariri, they now have little confidence that the former prime minister will deliver what is needed to restore the society. After all, he was unseated by unflinching demonstrators who filled Beirut's streets only a year ago.

Hariri's entry into politics

Born in Riyadh in 1970, Hariri holds dual Saudi-Lebanese citizenship. His family, which owns a massive business empire, enabled him to receive education in some of the finest schools in mixed foreign environments. After graduating with a business degree from Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. in 1992, Hariri joined the family business and was set to inherit a stake from his father in lucrative Saudi-based construction company Saudi Oger, one of the largest firms in the Middle East.

This was at a time when Hariri had zero interest in politics, but his future political career was, to some extent, already shaped by the inextricable ties his family had with Riyadh. Those ties were formed by his father, Rafic, who built his business in Saudi Arabia and made a fortune in construction deals with the Saudi royal court.

Rafic, who also served as Lebanon's prime minister for nearly a decade, was assassinated in February 2005, which marked the beginning of a new chapter in both Lebanese politics and Hariri junior's life. 

The young businessman was then left with his father's enormous political legacy. After a brief struggle, he hesitantly took over Rafic's leadership of the largest Sunni Muslim party in the country - the Future Movement. The Lebanese, who were saddened by the devastating assassination, began to see hope in the previously apolitical son.

In the meantime, Rafic's supporters did not go quietly after his killing. Convinced that Syria and its ally Shiite movement Hezbollah were behind the assassination, they held one of the largest demonstrations in Lebanon's history and successfully forced Syrian forces to withdraw. At the peak of this revolution, one of Lebanon's two most powerful political alliances – the March 14 Alliance – emerged, and Hariri and his party have been leading it since.

The shaping of a political identity

In the first election following Rafic's death, Hariri led the March 14 Alliance to an overwhelming victory. But citing a lack of experience in politics, he decided not to take the PM office and backed Fouad Siniora, a close ally of his father, for the post instead.  Hariri also began to redefine the political project he inherited from his father, emphasizing a Lebanese identity as opposed to the pan-Arab ideology previously advocated by his father and embraced by mostly Sunnis.

The March 14 Alliance, including parties of wide-ranging ethnic and religious identities, became known for its ties with Saudi Arabia and the West. It stands in direct opposition to the pro-Syria March 8 Alliance, formed by Hezbollah and its Shiite and Christian allied parties. Since 2005, Lebanon has been broadly split between the two giant electoral camps.

But despite some of the irreconcilable views that set the March 14 Alliance on a constant collision course with the March 8 Alliance, Hariri has at times opted to work with his political opponents from across the aisle, especially when Lebanon faced major political crises. His willingness to accommodate the rival camp also became one of Hariri's most identifiable merits, allowing him to form and preside over all-encompassing unity governments.

In May 2008, when a political stalemate was threatening to escalate a violent confrontation between Sunni-dominated militias and Shiite Hezbollah, Hariri helped secure a deal that lifted the country out of a major crisis, even though the deal benefited the March 8 Alliance, which was at the time in opposition to the government.

He also became the first prime minister to lead an unprecedented national unity government following another electoral victory in 2009. Shortly after, Hariri took a tough decision to visit Syria, his first time since his father was allegedly killed on Syrian orders.

In taking those steps, Hariri has gradually established himself as a responsible statesman driven by national, rather than personal or sectarian interests. This identity of his was further reinforced when he reached a momentous deal with the March 8 camp in 2016, breaking another yearslong political stalemate while allowing Michel Aoun, who leads Lebanon's biggest Christian party and is backed by Hezbollah and its allied parties, to be elected as president. Hariri was then named prime minister after leaving office some four years ago.

However, Hariri's displayed pragmatism did not always grant him good fortune. On some occasions, his firmly held principles prevented deals from happening. In January 2011, Hezbollah and its allies withdrew from the Hariri-led unity government over the investigation of his father's death, leading to the government's collapse. On other occasions, his supporters felt his compromises gave in too much, as exemplified in his party's poor performance in the 2018 election.

Most dramatically, Hariri's political tightrope-walking was once steadfastly rejected by his foreign backers, which led to one of his most fateful moments in life.

The curse and blessing of foreign ties

In November 2017, Hariri's name reverberated across international media outlets when he made a surprise declaration to resign as PM during a stay in Saudi Arabia. That declaration, however, was widely speculated to be under Saudi coercion. The conventional theory for the episode is that Saudis, who were angry over Iran's rising influence in Lebanon, blamed Hariri – a beneficiary of Riyadh's funding – for inaction.

After a brief period of disappearance from public life in Riyadh, Hariri was rescued by French President Emmanuel Macron, who wanted to assert stability in Lebanon. This marked the further entrenchment of the close personal ties already held between Macron and Hariri.

Upon his return to Beirut, Hariri rescinded the resignation, a move welcomed by his political opponents at home. However, he decided not to disclose what happened in Saudi Arabia and has kept his ties with Riyadh unchanged.

Leave and return

By 2019, Hariri had only intermittently run the country for less than five years, but pragmatism allowed him to become a candidate largely accepted by the broad swathe of Lebanon's competing factions. He had learned the hard way that confrontation with the political opposition, especially the heavily armed Hezbollah, was impossible and that coexistence was the only way.

Hanging on that belief, he has upheld Lebanon's power-sharing political system that reflects the ethnic, sectarian makeup of the country. But the same system, believed to have deeply cultivated cronyism and corruption across all government sectors, is spurned by the Lebanese public.

Absent of an intention to overhaul that system, as demanded by protesting Lebanese in recent years, and failing to launch fiscal reforms needed to unlock foreign aid, Hariri quit his office when the Lebanese people made their strongest call for resignation en mass last year.

However, the veteran prime minister did not fully retreat from the scene. He has been closely watching the worsening of Lebanon's longtime financial crisis and reprimanding the government that succeeded him for failing to address it. Since Beirut's catastrophic explosion in early August, his name has started to appear more frequently in media circles.

Now, with domestic support and the backing of Macron, who has heavily inserted himself into Lebanese politics and has been trying to get Hariri back for the PM post, the broadly unchallenged former prime minister is likely to have a better chance of quickly rolling out a government as he promised shortly after being designated. 

If successful, he will have to pull all he's got to restore the ever-fading public confidence and make amends for what he and his predecessors had failed to materialize.