Some Lebanese smile and cynically repeat: It may be the end of the world! It’s the last summer for Lebanon!

They say that as they review the successive and accumulated crises: Their country has been without a president since May 25, in light of the seemingly immense difficulty of electing a new one. Some predict that the Baabda Palace, the presidential residence on a plateau east of Beirut, will remain vacant and its lights turned off for many months.

After the crisis of the presidential vacuum, it seems that parliament is facing a similar fate. About a year ago, there appeared to be a general Lebanese inability to hold parliamentary elections. Thus parliament’s term, which was set to expire on June 20, 2013, was extended. The deputies decided to resort to a legal heresy in democratic systems because they extended their own parliamentary mandates and stayed on their chairs as representatives of the people without seeking the latter’s opinion in the matter.

Yet the extension they carried out a year ago was optimistic, because they thought it was long enough for matters in the country to return to normal. They thought that a new president would definitely be elected by spring 2014, and that this would allow for normal parliamentary elections later. So they extended their mandate only to Nov. 20, 2014.