Lebanon’s parliament elects army commander Joseph Aoun as president
Lebanon’s parliament voted Thursday to elect army commander Joseph Aoun as head of state, filling a more than two-year-long presidential vacuum.
The session was the legislature’s 13th attempt to elect a successor to Michel Aoun, whose term ended in October 2022.
General Joseph Aoun, head of the country’s army since 2017, received the required number of parliamentary votes in the second round of voting on Thursday afternoon.
Aoun is also regarded as a stabilising figure and trusted by many Lebanese and international partners: His victory is expected to unlock financial assistance from Gulf states to help rebuild parts of the country damaged or destroyed during the war.
The vote came weeks after a tenuous ceasefire agreement halted a 14-month conflict between Israel and the Lebanese militant 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 and Saudi Arabia, whose assistance Lebanon will need as it seeks to rebuild.
Hezbollah previously backed another candidate, Suleiman Frangieh, the leader of a small Christian 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 However, on Wednesday, Frangieh announced he had withdrawn from the race and endorsed Aoun, clearing the way for the army chief.
Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Middle East Institute, said that the military and political weakening of Hezbollah following its war with Israel and the fall of its ally, Assad, in Syria, along with international pressure to elect a president paved the way for Thursday’s result.
