BEIRUT (AP) – Lebanon’s Parliament voted to elect army commander Joseph Aoun as head of state, filling a more than two-year-long presidential vacuum.
The vote came weeks after a tenuous ceasefire agreement halted a 14-month conflict between Israel and the Lebanese group Hezbollah and at a time when Lebanon’s leaders are seeking international assistance for reconstruction.
Aoun, no relation to former President Michel Aoun, was widely seen as the preferred candidate of the United States (US) and Saudi Arabia, whose assistance Lebanon will need as it seeks to rebuild.
The session was the legislature’s 13th attempt to elect a successor to Michel Aoun, whose term ended in October 2022.
Hezbollah previously backed another candidate, Suleiman Frangieh, the leader of a small party in northern Lebanon with close ties to former Syrian President Bashar Assad.
However, on Wednesday, Frangieh announced he had withdrawn from the race and endorsed Aoun, clearing the way for the army chief.
A senior fellow at the Washington, DC-based Middle East Institute Randa Slim, said that the military and political weakening of Hezbollah following its war with Israel and the fall of Assad, in Syria, along with international pressure to elect a president paved the way for yesterday’s result.
In a first round of voting, Aoun received 71 out of 128 votes but fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to win outright. Of the rest, 37 lawmakers cast blank ballots and 14 voted for “sovereignty and the constitution.”
In the second round, he received 99 votes.
The head of Hezbollah’s parliamentary bloc, Mohammed Raad, implied that the group’s legislators had withheld their votes from Aoun in the first round but voted for him in the second in bid to show that Hezbollah – even in its diminished state – cannot be politically sidelined.
“We postponed our vote because we wanted to send a message that just as we are protectors of Lebanon’s sovereignty, we are protectors of the national accord,” Raad said after the election.
Aoun was escorted by a marching band into the Parliament building in downtown Beirut where he took the oath of office.
