Politics & Power Quote by Rafic Hariri

Hariri’s genius here is the way he demotes conflict without denying it. “We don’t think that we are in a quarrel with anybody” is less a factual claim than a political spell: it tries to make the quarrel socially illegitimate. In a country where every disagreement can be recruited into sectarian scorekeeping, the word “quarrel” signals something petty, emotional, even childish. Hariri reframes politics as administration: differences of opinion exist, sure, but they must not be allowed to harden into obstacles to “reconstructing the country.”

That verb matters. “Reconstructing” is a program, a deadline, a demand for discipline. It carries the postwar promise that rubble can be turned into normal life if everyone stops treating politics as a zero-sum vendetta. The subtext is also a warning: there are actors who benefit when differences “grow into a problem,” and Hariri positions himself as the one adult in the room, the manager of national recovery, implicitly above faction.

Then he slips in the real stakes: “regaining the democratic path.” Not “starting” it, regaining it. That word admits a fall from legitimacy without litigating who caused it, a tactically inclusive move in a landscape shaped by civil war, militia power, and foreign influence. Hariri is offering a bargain: suspend the impulse to escalate, accept procedural politics, and you get rebuilding and a return to self-rule. It’s statesmanship as narrative control - trying to make “democracy” and “reconstruction” the only respectable destinations, and making prolonged conflict look like sabotage.