Lebanon’s parliament has elected the army commander Joseph Aoun as the country’s new president, ending a more than two-year vacancy and increasing confidence that a ceasefire with Israel will hold.
Aoun received 99 out of 128 votes in the 13th attempt by a deeply divided parliament to elect a new head of state after the departure of the former president Michel Aoun, who is no relation, in October 2022. Aoun was the favoured candidate of international powers such as Saudi Arabia, France and the US, which enjoyed good relations with him in his role as head of Lebanon’s armed forces.
The main task for Aoun is to reassert the role of the Lebanese army, particularly in south Lebanon, where since the late 1970s the army’s control has been contested by groups such as the Palestine Liberation Organisation and Hezbollah.
Speaking before parliament after his election, Aoun vowed to “confirm the state’s right to monopolise the carrying of weapons” and emphasised the army’s right to control the country’s borders.
All armed groups in Lebanon were meant to disarm under a 2004 UN resolution, but Hezbollah retained its arms under the justification that it was the only force that could protect Lebanon from Israel. The Lebanese army has historically been a weak force.
Under the terms of the Israel-Hezbollah ceasefire signed on 27 November, the Lebanese army is to deploy in south Lebanon, while Hezbollah is meant to withdraw, in what politicians and diplomats have styled as the reclaiming of Lebanese state sovereignty.
Michel Helou, the secretary general of the reformist National Bloc party, who has met Aoun several times, said: “The first priority is the ceasefire and the second is dealing with Hezbollah’s weapons. There is no clear way to disarm Hezbollah, but if [Aoun] wants to be remembered he will have to deal with them.”
The presence of a head of state was also seen as necessary to ensure the continuous implementation of the ceasefire agreement. Israeli media had reported in recent weeks that it was considering staying in south Lebanon beyond the 60-day timetable of its withdrawal from Lebanese territory as specified in the deal.
Hezbollah has dominated Lebanese politics for more than two decades, placing its members in cabinet positions and controlling key ministries. The group has been severely battered in 14 months of fighting with Israel, with its secretary general and most of its senior leadership killed. The loss of its key regional ally, Syria’s former president Bashar al-Assad, who facilitated Iranian weapons transfers across Syria to Lebanon, was another in a series of blows to Hezbollah.
Hilal Khashan, a professor at the American University of Beirut, said: “Hezbollah today is not what it used to be two years ago … I think that the army will be able to confront Hezbollah, but neither side is interested in confrontation.”
Hezbollah’s preferred candidate for the presidency, Suleiman Frangieh, withdrew on Wednesday afternoon, endorsing Aoun. Hezbollah had repeatedly vetoed all candidates except Frangieh over the last two years.
A president can only be appointed in Lebanon with two-thirds, or 86 of parliament’s deputies’ votes. The inability of Hezbollah and rival opposition blocs, the largest of which was made up of the Maronite Christian Lebanese Forces party, to come to a consensus produced a two-year gridlock on filling the presidential vacancy.
Aoun is seen as removed from the sectarian power-sharing system that characterises Lebanon’s political system, as the Lebanese army deliberately diversifies its sectarian makeup to maintain the institution’s neutrality in a country that experienced a bloody, inter-sect civil war from 1975-1990.
The Hezbollah-Israel war, as well as external pressure, had seemingly helped finally overcome that gridlock on Thursday. In the days before the election, a series of diplomats visited Beirut to hold talks with the main political figures.
The election of Aoun is the first step in ending Lebanon’s international isolation. The country’s 2019 financial meltdown, in which the banking sector collapsed and millions of people’s savings were confiscated by banks, laid bare the political class’s deep corruption. The international community promised aid to the country – but only after the government made urgent economic and political changes.
The Lebanese MP Alain Aoun said: “This is a sort of reconciliation with the international community and the Gulf countries. This is the real added value of the election of Joseph Aoun – that he brings a translation of this international support.”
International powers have pledged to aid reconstruction efforts in Lebanon post-ceasefire, which had sustained billions in damages as a result of the 14 months of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. Much of the destruction is concentrated among Hezbollah’s constituency in the southern suburbs of Beirut, south Lebanon and the Bekaa valley – which bore the brunt of Israel’s bombing campaign.
However, the election of a president is only the first step towards lifting Lebanon out of the myriad economic and political crises in which it has been mired since 2019. Aoun will inherit a six-year-long economic malaise, stalled negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, and the same political class that helped orchestrate the economic crisis it is meant to solve.
The power of the executive in Lebanon is limited. Besides overseeing the army, Aoun has the power to form a new government, no easy task in Lebanon’s sectarian, power-sharing system.
Lebanon has a confessional political system under which political appointments are distributed across the country’s 18 sects. Though the confessional system is an unwritten agreement and not a part of Lebanon’s constitution, it has nonetheless dictated governments’ formation since the country’s independence from France.
Aoun, as a Maronite Christian, was qualified to be the country’s president, while the prime minister must be a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of the parliament a Shia Muslim. Cabinets are filled along sectarian quotas and ministries are treated as fiefdoms of political parties, tools that Lebanon’s political parties – mostly led by civil war-era leaders – maintain their grip on the country.
The new president will next appoint a prime minister, which has to be approved by parliament. The prime minister will then suggest a list of ministers for their cabinet, which will go to a parliamentary vote.
The formation of a government is no easy task – the current cabinet, led by the caretaker prime minister, Najib Mikati, was only formed after 13 months of consultations.
“We will need to have a proper, solid government … We want this mandate to be a period of reconstruction and reform for Lebanon,” Helou said.
Article by:Source William Christou in Beirut
