Analysis
Lebanon now also has a prime minister: Nawaf Salam
A diplomat, jurist and academic, Salam has advocated in his writings for an electoral reform that could overturn the sectarian-confessional system that Lebanon is laboring under.
Nawaf Salam is Lebanon's new prime minister. At the first vote, the 128 votes in the Lebanese parliament came down as 84 in favor of Salam, 9 for outgoing premier Najib Miqati and 35 blank ballots, signaling very wide support for the new prime minister. On Thursday, the same solid base of support showed itself in the election of the country’s new president, former Lebanese Armed Forces commander Joseph Aoun, with 99 votes in favor.
With his election, Nawaf Salam has to leave his post as president of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, one of the six United Nations bodies, which he had led since February 6 of last year. One cannot predict at this point whether his departure will signal a change in the Court’s orientation, which in recent months has had a particular focus on Israel’s human rights violations in Gaza and Lebanon.
A diplomat, jurist and academic, Salam has advocated in his writings for an electoral reform that could overturn the sectarian-confessional system that Lebanon is laboring under, the fight against corruption and greater independence of the judiciary.
Due to his positions, Salam’s election has also been welcomed by the social movements that during Thaura – the anti-system uprising that began in 2019 at the start of the most serious economic-financial crisis in Lebanon's history – proposed a wholesale removal of the ruling political class. He has also been welcomed by the nonpartisan and anti-sectarian Beirut Madinati (“Beirut, My City”) movement that held a rally in Martyrs' Square, the symbolic site of the popular uprising, on Saturday, after Salam’s election.
Hezbollah showed signs of nervousness for this particular vote, delaying a meeting for consultations with newly elected President Aoun and deciding to cast blank votes only after Salam already had the numbers to be elected (the Shiites had supported Miqati). By this, Hezbollah made its weakness visible at an institutional level and further isolated itself, while it could have aimed for a more central role in the formation of the government in light of the National Pact, the unwritten confessional power-sharing agreement established in 1943, the year of Lebanon's independence from France. The Shiites (Amal-Hezbollah) have about 30 MPs, a quarter of the total seats.
On hearing the news, Saudi Arabia restarted flights to and from Beirut, and Nawaf Salam's election was welcomed unanimously at the international level.
On the historic date of January 27, the two-month cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah – or rather, as Aoun specified in his inauguration speech, between Israel and Lebanon – is set to end. However, the Israeli military, benefiting from an agreement heavily skewed in its favor, has continued shelling southern Lebanon; on Saturday, they struck the outskirts of Baalbek in the northeast of the country. On Friday, the Israeli army hit a car carrying five fighters in Amal, killing them.
However, with the fall of Bashar al Assad's regime in Syria and the closure of land routes for supplies from Iran, the notion that Hezbollah could rearm in the short term is untenable at this point, which is, at the formal level, Israeli’s reason for why the bombings would continue.
Lebanon must undergo a phase of structural reforms necessary to bring in the money already allocated by the International Monetary Fund. A government team is already being worked on, together with the transition. While Aoun and particularly Salam are perceived to be outside the political class, those who are actually managing the country's economic power are the same families directly or indirectly represented in parliament, and the incoming government will give substance to the new balance of power in Lebanon.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/nawaf-salam-ii-libano-ora-ha-anche-un-premier on 2025-01-14