“We must break with the past to build the future and turn the grim pages of our history” Michel Aoun anuary”
By Corneliu Pivariu, CEO INGEPO Consulting, MG (two stars general – ret.)
On 1 October 201, the Lebanese Parliament ended the longest period in the history of Lebanon without a President (2 months since the end of President Michel Suleimans term of office – May 2014) after parliamentary sessions in which no candidate could reach the needed quorum to be elected.
The new President is General Michel Aoun, whose election had been expected by many people, including the longeval (first elected on 20 October 1992 and re-elected several times) President of the Lebanese Parliament, Abih Berri, President of the Amal movement (since1980).
General Michel Aoun (born 18 February 1935) can be considered a legendary figure in Lebanon. He was promoted to the rank of general in 1984 and the same year he was appointed commander in chief of the Lebanese army. His military education includes training courses in France and the US. From 22 September 1988 to 13 October 1990 he acted as Prime Minister, having been assigned by President Amine Gemayel at the end of his term of office (a controversial decision which led to the existence of two parallel governments, one led by General Aoun, the other led by Prime Minister Selim Hoss).
On 14 March 1989 Aoun announced the liberation war (against the Syrian armed forces), and on 13 October the Syrian army strongly supported by aviation attacked the area controlled by Aoun, including the presidential palace in Baabda, killing hundreds of Lebanese soldiers and civilians. General Aoun took refuge at the French Embassy in Beirut, later being evacuated in an operation of the French intelligence services and army and he received political asylum in France, where he has remained for 15 years – until 2005. He returned to Beirut on 7 May 2005, 11 days after the withdrawal of the Syrian troops from Lebanon, being cheered by hundreds of thousands of Lebanese people in the streets of Beirut.
His political evolution is marked by a high tenacity, a great understanding of the complicated political developments in Lebanon, of the relations between different parties, groups and personalities, but also of the regional and global geopolitical developments. In 2006, as head of the Patriotic Liberation Movement, he signed the Memorandum of Understanding with Hezbollah, an alliance that remained in effect even today, and in 2009 he proved his political maturity again by visiting Syria.
His complex personality made us insist and succeed in obtaining an interview for the Geostrategic Pulse during our travel to Beirut in the summer of 2010, which has been published in a special issue dedicated to Lebanon. Michel Aoun continued to prove maturity and appropriateness on the Lebanese political arena in order to reach a political consensus to elect a President at the end of Michel Suleimans mandate in 2014 and he gradually succeeded it. The public statement made by Saad Hariri on 20 October in which he showed that his parliamentary block – Alliance 14 March ( 45 MPs) would vote for the election of Michel Aoun as president, is another signal for the settlement of the presidential crisis.
There are also the positions of other Lebanese political leaders, of which we mention Samir Geagea, which does not mean that they have a less important role. Although Michel Aoun was elected with 83 votes out of 127, this majority was reached only in the second valid ballot (after the first round, two other rounds were invalidated due to a number of votes higher than the numbers of MP present). General Aoun obtained 84 votes in the first round (one vote less than the two-thirds majority required), for the second round being required only a simple majority of 50 % plus one (64 votes).
These details highlight the fragility of the Lebanese political arena and if from the outside it would seem that a new President would be mostly the result of the agreements between Tehran and Riyadh or of Moscows influence (in early October Saad Hariri met Sergei Lavrov in Moscow), the election of President Michel Aoun is primarily due to the domestic political arrangements.
In his first speech after being elected as President, Aoun spoke about: the primary concern for “political stability, respect of the law, the National Pact and the Constitution”; “the necessity to adopt a new electoral law to ensure fair representativeness to the next parliamentary elections” (scheduled for June 2017); Lebanons neutrality; economic and social reforms; “the provision of security and stability through cooperation between security services and justice” the consolidation of the army – as a priority. A new prime minister is to be appointed, most likely in the person of Saad Hariri, the new government is to be formed, but that does not mean that the old problems will be solved in Lebanon.
About the author:
Corneliu Pivariu, former first deputy for military intelligence (two stars general) in the Romanian MoD, retired 2003. Member of IISS – London, alumni of Harvard – Kennedy School Executive Education and others international organizations. Founder of INGEPO Consulting, and bimonthly Bulletin, Geostrategic Pulse”. Main areas of expertise – geopolitics, intelligence and security.
Photography by INGEPO Consulting Photographer Ionus Paraschiv.
