Najib Mikati has been elected prime minister and will try to form a coalition where his predecessor failed for ten months. Quite a bit of criticism has already been heard about the appointment of someone who is considered by many to be part of the messy establishment

'I do not have a magic wand and I cannot perform miracles alone. We are in a difficult situation, we have a difficult task ahead of us and we will only be able to complete it successfully if we all work together," said Lebanese President-elect Najib Mikati after receiving the appointment on Monday. 

This makes Mikati the third candidate to try to form a government in a collapsing country in the past year, since Hassan Diab resigned following the explosion in the port of Beirut. He was preceded by Mustafa Adiv who raised his hands after about a month, and Saad Hariri, who tried to meet the challenge for nearly ten months. "May God help Lebanon," Hariri said in despair when he announced his failure, about two weeks ago. 

Najib Mikati, who was born 65 years ago in Tripoli in northern Lebanon, is considered the richest man in the country and one of the richest in the Middle East, and has an estimated fortune of $ 2.7 billion, according to Forbes' latest list of billionaires. In the 1980s, he and his brother Taha (with whom he shared first place on Forbes' list) founded the telecommunications company Investcom, which he sold to a South African corporation in 2006 for $ 5.5 billion. In 2007, the brothers founded the investment giant M1 Group (Curiosity: M1 recently acquired the leading telecom company in Myanmar, which is again under the rule of the military junta. It is worth examining the company's investments in general to see where the wind is blowing).

In interviews with the Lebanese press, Mikati said he would form a technocratic expert government "as soon as possible" with 24 ministers and which will act on the French roadmap for rehabilitating the country, outlining the reforms needed from the IMF, and that he had received "external guarantees" to accept the appointment. However, the road to government is not expected to be easy, especially due to opposition from Christian parties in parliament and tensions with President Michel Aoun (whose party abstained from voting) - the main reason for Hariri's failure to form a government.