On Thursday, Lebanon’s parliament voted to elect army chief commander Joseph Aoun as the 14th president of the country, 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 Hezbollah group and at a time when Lebanon’s leaders are seeking international assistance for reconstruction.

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 what Israel destroyed in the aerial  bombing of the country.

The session was the legislature’s 13th attempt to elect a successor to former President Michel Aoun, whose term ended in October 2022.

Hezbollah previously backed another candidate, Suleiman Frangieh, the leader of a Christian party in northern Lebanon. However, on Wednesday, Frangieh announced he had withdrawn from the race and endorsed Aoun, clearing the way for the army chief.

In a first round of the parliament members voting on Thursday, 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”, among other names.

In the second round, Aoun 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 a bid to show that Hezbollah 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.

Some streets erupted in celebratory fireworks and gunshots. In Aoun’s hometown of Aichiye in Jezzine province, southern Lebanon, people waved the Lebanese flag and distributed traditional sweets, while local media showed the slaughter of a sheep in celebration.

Lebanon’s army chief Joseph Aoun walks after being elected as the country’s president at the parliament building in Beirut, Lebanon, January 9. – Photo by Reuters

In a speech to parliament, Aoun pledged to carry out reforms to the judicial system, fight corruption and work to consolidate the state’s exclusive rights to the carrying of weapons.

He also promised to control the country’s borders and “ensure the activation of the security services and to discuss a strategic defense policy that will enable the Lebanese state to remove the Israeli occupation from all Lebanese territories” in southern Lebanon, where the Israeli military has not yet withdrawn from dozens of villages.

He also vowed to reconstruct “what the Israeli army destroyed in the south, east and (Beirut’s southern) suburbs.”

Lebanon’s fractious sectarian power-sharing system is prone to deadlock, both for political and procedural reasons. The small, crisis-battered Mediterranean country has been through several extended presidential vacancies, with the longest lasting nearly two and a half years between May 2014 and October 2016. It ended when former President Michel Aoun was elected.

The president’s role in Lebanon is limited under the power-sharing system in which the president is always a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Muslim and the speaker of the parliament Shi’a.

However, the president has the power to appoint or remove a prime minister and jointly with the prime minister form the cabinet, but after required consultation with bloc parliament leaders. The caretaker government that has run Lebanon for the last two years has reduced and limited powers because the country doesn’t have a sitting president.

Joseph Aoun is the fifth former army commander to ascend to Lebanon’s presidency, despite the fact that the country’s constitution prohibits high-ranking public servants, including army commanders, from assuming the presidency during their term or within two years of stepping down.

Under normal circumstances, a presidential candidate in Lebanon can be elected by a two-thirds majority of the 128-member house in the first round of voting, or by a simple majority in a subsequent round.

But because of the constitutional issues surrounding his election, Aoun needed a two-thirds majority in the second round as well to win the election. Hezbollah and Amal Movement members combined bloc handed him the presidency with 99 votes.

Aoun, 60, was appointed army chief in March 2017 and had been set to retire in January 2024, but his term was extended twice during the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. He kept a low profile and avoided media appearances and never formally announced his candidacy.

Other contenders included Jihad Azour, a former finance minister who is now the director of the Middle East and Central Asia Department at the International Monetary Fund, and Elias al-Baysari, the acting head of Lebanon’s General Security agency. Al-Baysari announced Thursday that he was pulling out of the race.

The next government will face daunting challenges apart from implementing the ceasefire agreement that ended the Israel-Hezbollah war and seeking funds for reconstruction.

Lebanon is in its sixth year of an economic and financial crisis that decimated the country’s currency and wiped out the savings of many Lebanese. The cash-strapped state electricity company provides only a few hours of power a day.

– AP wire service contributed to this report. Edited for style.