The Commander-in-Chief of the Lebanese Armed Forces, Joseph Aoun, has been elected as the new President of Lebanon. In the Parliament in Beirut, he won the necessary majority in the second round of voting on Thursday.
Lebanon has been without a president since the end of the term of the former President Michel Aoun, who is not related to Joseph Aoun, in October 2022. This is the first time in two years that the country has had a regular head of state. There were twelve failed attempts to elect a president in the past two years prior to the parliamentary sessions on Thursday.
The former president was supported by Hezbollah, which in turn is supported by Iran. The negotiations over the succession initially failed, which again exacerbated the tensions between the pro-Western and pro-Iranian camps in the country.
A US-mediated ceasefire agreement, which ended the war between Hezbollah and Israel in the previous November, seemed to also hasten the long-awaited presidential elections. Israel’s attack on Hezbollah dealt the latter a severe blow, followed shortly by the fall of the Iranian-backed Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
In the system of confessional power-sharing in the small country in the eastern Mediterranean, the Lebanese President is typically a Maronite Christian.