Who Will Lead Lebanon?
For the past two years, Hezbollah and its allies have blocked the election of a new president while a caretaker cabinet runs the cedars’ country
Taylor Thomas/ The Media Line
[Beirut] In one of the last speeches of former Lebanese President Michel Aoun, he celebrated the demarcation of the maritime borders between Lebanon and the neighboring enemy state, Israel. The country of the cedars “has the right to consider this agreement as a historic achievement,” he said then, two October ago, because “Lebanon has not conceded a single kilometer to Israel.”
Not even Aoun himself, two years after his absence, would have imagined that those same waters that he protected would now be infested with Israeli warships. Today, these ships fire artillery at southern Lebanon. Meanwhile, planes bomb the entire country, and soldiers tread and occupy Lebanese land without anyone stopping them. Two years without a president or a government have left the Lebanese state lost in combat.
Poor, eroded, and antiquated. And for two autumns now, with no one at the ship’s helm. “The Lebanese state is in very bad shape,” said Abdallah Khoury, a Lebanese political expert. “There is little money, the state is bankrupt, so state institutions have been declining and disintegrating, causing the capacity of the state and its administrations to erode,” he told The Media Line.
On October 31, 2022, the mandate of Michel Aoun, Lebanon’s last president, expired. Since then, political parties have been unable to agree on choosing a new head of state. In the sectarian system that governs Lebanon, this has to be a Maronite Christian. At the same time, the prime minister is always a Sunni Muslim, and the president of the Parliament is a Shia Muslim. Before Aoun, the post was also vacant for two and a half years.
When the war broke out in Lebanon on September 23, following the escalation of Israeli bombings across the territory, the civilian population realized that, overnight, they were plunged into a conflict in complete solitude. There was no one to ask for explanations. There were no institutions to help them.
“We are alone. The government and we are hostages, depending on what Hezbollah wants to do,” said Charbel, a young Lebanese accountant from a mountain village close to the city of Byblos. “We are in the hands of terrorists,” he told The Media Line resigned.
Khoury talks deeply about the consequences of this political absence: “Without a president, there is no central figure in the state who can establish Lebanon’s official position because, for that, a president’s signature is needed.” However, it is not only a head of state, a commander-in-chief of the army, that Lebanon needs. The land of the cedars also needs a government. Since the parliamentary elections in May 2022, Lebanese political parties have also been unable to form a new cabinet.
“The government is acting as a caretaker; so far, that has not prevented it from operating, but not in a very effective way, as it cannot take new measures, at least from a constitutional point of view,” Khoury admitted. But now, during the war, the work is multiplying. Since cross-border clashes between Israel and Hezbollah began in October last year, some 100,000 people from border villages have already been forced to leave their homes. During all this time, they have not received any help from the government.
Following the escalation, which has already killed more than 3,000 people across the country, the interim cabinet activated a national emergency plan for a joint humanitarian response with United Nations organizations and partners. It opened hundreds of schools as shelters for the 1.2 million newly displaced.
As the conflict grinds on, Hezbollah has refrained from relying on any particular US administration to achieve a cease-fire. Hezbollah leader Ibrahim al-Moussawi, responding to Donald Trump’s recent election victory, stated that while the change in US leadership was noted, Hezbollah remains skeptical of substantial shifts in American policy toward Israel. He underscored that US support has historically shielded Israel from international accountability, citing its backing as a reason for Hezbollah’s continued resistance. While Trump has hinted at swiftly negotiating a resolution, his emissary Massad Boulos, a Lebanese-American businessman, pledged to engage Lebanese officials to broker peace before Trump’s inauguration.
As Israel continues to crack down on rescue and emergency services operating in the areas under attack, the reality is becoming increasingly clear that the fragile Lebanese state could also fall victim to this war. The more the conflict continues, the less influence the already shaky administration will have.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought to inflame sectarian tensions in Lebanon by appealing to a civilian population already angry at Hezbollah for leading them into civil war. “We don’t like what is happening, but we cannot do anything to stop it. Just hope that things don’t get worse,” said Charbel.
Not only is Israel trying to influence Lebanese national politics, but its allies are, too. “The Americans see the only functioning institution in Lebanon today as the parliament, under the control of its president Nabih Berri, an ally of Hezbollah,” Khoury said. “There is this political calculation based on the desire to eliminate the central position that Berri and the parliament play in order to counter Hezbollah at the political level,” the researcher added.
“They would like to eliminate the monopoly that Nabih Berri has over the state system since, today, the parliament is the main decision-maker in Lebanon,” Khoury explained. “In addition, in Berri’s relations with Prime Minister Najib Mikati, there is a perception that Berri has a lot of influence over Mikati and that he is the first to make the decisions,” he analyzed. Recent history has shown that the Lebanese government has little say in whether its country remains in the grip of a war or not.
Despite the blows Hezbollah has suffered in recent weeks—including the assassination of its leader for the past 32 years, Hassan Nasrallah—the party maintains its political power through the blockade. Many of its opponents, as well as the administration of President Joe Biden, believe that now would be a good time, taking advantage of its weakening, to get around the blockade imposed on the election of a president and finally choose a head of state.
After having its ally Aoun in office, Hezbollah has defended the candidacy of Suleiman Frangieh, an associate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. The Shiite militia fought alongside his troops in the toughest years of the Syrian civil war. On the other side, Washington supports Joseph Aoun, the current commander of the armed forces, who represents the only national institution that retains the respect of most Lebanese.
“Hezbollah has its candidate and wants him to be president; if not, they would see the Americans and the Israelis as imposing their own choice and profiting from the military losses,” Khoury said. “That is why the army commander is very careful not to take any position; he does not want to be elected on this basis. He wants a consensus on this candidacy,” he concluded. The election of President Bashir Gemayel amid Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982 brought some hope of achieving what parliamentarians had failed to achieve in two years of peacetime. But Gemayel was assassinated weeks after his appointment –a fate that no one wants for themselves.
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