BEIRUT -- Lebanon's parliament voted Thursday to elect army commander Joseph Aoun as head of state, 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 militant group Hezbollah and at a time when Lebanon's leaders are seeking international assistance for reconstruction.
Aoun, no relation to former President Michel 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.
The session was the legislature's 13th attempt to elect a successor to Michel Aoun, whose term ended in October 2022.
Hezbollah previously backed another candidate, Suleiman Frangieh, the leader of a small Christian party in northern Lebanon with close ties to former Syrian President Bashar Assad. However, on Wednesday, Frangieh announced he had withdrawn from the race and endorsed Aoun, clearing the way for the army chief.
Randa Slim, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Middle East Institute, said that the military and political weakening of Hezbollah after its war with Israel and the fall of its ally Assad in Syria, along with international pressure to elect a president, paved the way for Thursday's result.
In a first round of voting 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."
In the second round, he 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 bid to show that Hezbollah -- even in its diminished state -- 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 broke out 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.
In a speech to parliament, Aoun pledged to carry out reforms to the judicial system, fight corruption and work to consolidate the state's right to "monopolize the carrying of weapons," in an apparent allusion to the arms of Hezbollah.
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 2½ years between May 2014 and October 2016. It ended when former President Michel Aoun was elected.
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.
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.
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.
The country's leaders reached a preliminary agreement with the IMF for a bail-out package in 2022 but have made limited progress on reforms required to clinch the deal.