Lebanon's Hariri promises to return to clarify position as he meets Emmanuel Macron in Paris

Saad Hariri, the Lebanese prime minister, has said he will return to Beirut in the coming days and explain his sudden resignation - and mysterious stay in Saudi Arabia - which has sparked political turmoil in Lebanon.

"I will participate in the celebrations for our independence (on Wednesday) and it is there that I will make known my position on all the issues after meeting with the president of our republic, General Michel Aoun," he told reporters in Paris.

Mr Hariri made the promise at the Elysée palace after a meeting with French President Emmanuel Macron, during which he thanked France, a former colonial ruler of Lebanon, for the "positive political role" it is playing in the Middle East.

Mr Macron leveraged France’s close relations with both Saudi Arabia and Lebanon to secure a deal that saw Mr Hariri travel to Paris and begin a possible resolution of the crisis sparked when he announced his resignation on November 4 from Riyadh.

The French leader seized the role of mediator in the crisis after making a surprise visit to the Saudi capital on November 9 and inviting Mr Hariri to Paris to dispel fears that he was being held in Riyadh against his will.

A smiling Mr Hariri posed with his wife and eldest son on the steps of the Elysée on Saturday alongside Mr Macron and his wife, Brigitte. His two younger children, who live in Saudi Arabia, have remained there "for their school exams", a source told AFP news agency.

His relaxed appearance contrasted sharply with what were  seen as wooden, carefully choreographed appearances from Saudi Arabia.

While Mr Hariri has insisted that he resigned of his own volition, many Lebanese believe that he was forced to step down by Saudi Arabia as part of its regional campaign to confront Iranian influence in the Middle East.  

Michel Aoun, Lebanon’s president and an ally of Hizbollah, the Lebanese Shia group which is closely aligned with Iran, accused Saudi Arabia of holding Mr Hariri “hostage” in Riyadh and has refused to accept his resignation until he delivers it in person in Beirut.

Maha Yahya, the director of the Carnegie Middle East Centre, said that whatever Saudi Arabia had hoped to achieve through the resignation of Mr Hariri, a Sunni, it had ended up uniting Lebanese citizens of all sects in anger at Riyadh. 

“With Lebanon so far what they’ve done has backfired. You are in a situation today where Saudi Arabia has undermined the pre-eminent representative of the Sunni community in Lebanon and alienated the Sunni base," she said.

The Arab League is due to meet on Sunday at Saudi Arabia’s request and Riyadh is pushing its fellow states to aggressively condemn Iran and the firing of a missile from Yemen into Saudi territory two weeks ago.

Saudi Arabia may also try to get its neighbours to pass a resolution condemning Hizbollah, which may not sit well with states like Iraq that have benefitted from the Lebanese group’s fight against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil).

Other Arab countries are sympathetic to Hizbollah’s defiance of Israel and may be reluctant to criticise it in public.  

In another development, Saudi Arabia has recalled its ambassador to Berlin in protest at comments by Germany's Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel which were interpreted as a suggestion that Mr Hariri - whose father, ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri, was killed in a 2005 car bombing blamed on Hizbollah - was acting under orders from Riyadh.

Mr Hariri’s stay in Paris, where his family have a plush residence lent to French ex-president Jacques Chirac for several years, may have eased tensions in the Middle East, but the Lebanese PM might face another sort of crisis in the French capital.

His family’s construction firm Oger International, which is headquartered in a Parisian suburb, recently went bankrupt, leaving salaries and pensions worth millions of dollars unpaid around the world since 2015.

Dozens of laid-off French employees are suing for millions of euros in French courts to get their money from the company.

Meanwhile, dozens of Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest men, who were detained in an anti-corruption crackdown, are in their second week of detention in a gilded prison at Riyadh’s Ritz Carlton hotel.

Princes, sheikhs and business moguls used to sleeping in royal suites have spent their nights on the floor of the hotel ballrooms under cheap blankets and the watchful eyes of security forces loyal to Mohammed bin Salman.

This week it emerged there was a possible way out of captivity: handing over millions of dollars in assets, shares, and cash to the Saudi state.