Lebanon to elect president in January after ceasefire with Israel

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Lebanon’s parliament will elect a president on January 9, the house’s Speaker announced on Thursday, jolting the political deadlock that has gripped the country for two years as a fragile ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah took hold.

The post of president has been empty since 2022 and Lebanon has faced a leadership crisis, with the state led by a caretaker government through the more than year-long war between the Lebanese militant group and Israel that has shattered large areas of the country.

Nabih Berri, the Speaker of parliament, told a legislative session: “I had promised myself that as soon as there is a ceasefire, I will set a date for a session to elect a president of the republic.”

Lebanon’s presidency is reserved for a Maronite Christian by convention under the country’s confessional political system. MPs and political blocs put forward candidates, who must secure backing from two-thirds of parliamentarians, then win a simple majority in subsequent voting rounds to become the head of state.

Political paralysis had gripped the country in the year before the war as no parliamentary alliance was able to secure enough support for their preferred candidates.

Electoral sessions were delayed because the Hizbollah-Amal parliamentary bloc was unable to amass enough support for their candidate, said Diana Menhem, acting director of reform advocacy group Kulluna Irada.

The war was then used as a pretext by political parties to postpone the election as they waited to see how the conflict would shake out, she said. “They all wanted to see how this would end, in order for them to build on it.”

The announcement came on the second day of a tense truce between Lebanese militant group Hizbollah and Israel, with a mass return of displaced residents tempered by Israeli military warnings and sporadic shelling along the border.

On Thursday morning the Israeli military told south Lebanon residents that anyone travelling below a line of villages about 7km from the two countries’ disputed border, known as the Blue Line, would “put themselves in danger”.

Two people were injured by an Israeli shell that struck the village of Markaba near the border, Lebanese state media reported on Thursday morning. The strikes followed overnight shelling in the villages of Aita al Chaab and Bint Jbeil, which were heavily bombarded throughout the war.

The Israeli military did not immediately comment on the attacks.

The US-brokered ceasefire deal outlines a gradual withdrawal of Israeli forces and Hizbollah militants from southern Lebanon over the course of 60 days.

The Lebanese Armed Forces and UN peacekeeping troops are set to deploy widely in the region as part of the agreement, which will be enforced by a US-led monitoring mechanism.

More than 3,800 Lebanese and 140 Israelis have been killed in the fighting, which was triggered when Iran-backed Hizbollah began firing into northern Israel in the days after Hamas’s October 7 2023 attack from Gaza.

About 60,000 Israelis have also been evacuated from the north of their country because of Hizbollah rocket, missile and drone fire.

The offensive dealt a series of devastating blows to Hizbollah, killing its longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah and damaging large amounts of its weapons and infrastructure.