At the 13th time of asking, Lebanon’s parliament finally elected a president this month: General Joseph Aoun. At 61, he has been Commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) since 2017. He was elected on 9 January, a day before his birthday, and will now serve a six-year term.
Despite the country’s constitution banning any serving army commander from being elected president, Aoun becomes the fifth army general to become president after Fouad Chehab, Emile Lahoud, Michel Sleiman, and most recently, Michel Aoun.
Michel Aoun's (no relation) term expired on 31 October 2022. Since then, there has been a vacancy in the Baabda Palace. By convention, the president and the head of the army is always a Maronite Christian (the prime minister is always a Sunni Muslim and the deputy prime minister is Greek Orthodox).
Rise through the ranks
Born in 1964 in Sin El Fil, a suburb of Beirut, to a Maronite family originating from the southern Lebanese town of Al-Ayshiyeh, Aoun joined the army aged 19. His cohort was named the ‘Army Martyrs Class’ because the civil war was still ongoing. His first battles were against armed militias.
Graduating in 1985, Aoun completed the Rangers’ course before becoming platoon commander in the Special Forces. He trained abroad from 2008-13, including in Syria and the United States, where he learned about counter-terrorism, rising through the ranks over the years to eventually attain the rank of General. By 2015, he was commanding the 9th Infantry Brigade along the border with Israel.
By 2017, he was Army Commander, succeeding Gen. Jean Kahwaji. In January 2024, Aoun turned 60—the legal retirement age for an army general—but Lebanon’s parliament extended his tenure for another 12 months because, three months earlier, Hamas had attacked southern Israel, and Hezbollah was supportive. In November, on a point of rare political consensus, they extended it again.
Navigating challenges
During Gen. Aoun’s tenure as Commander, the LAF has faced significant political, financial, and military challenges, and he is credited with navigating these crises with minimal damage to the army and Lebanon as a whole.
In one now-famous example of his pragmatism, he allowed his 80,000 soldiers to work certain days of the week and moonlight in second jobs on the others. Why? Because the state is effectively bankrupt, their army salaries are insufficient to sustain a household, and if he did not let them earn from other activities (such as taxi driving), he knew he would lose them. Better a part-time army than none.
In August 2017, just months after assuming command, LAF units and jihadists belonging to Islamic State (IS) and Jabhat al-Nusra clashed along the Lebanon-Syria border, where the Islamist militant groups had established positions in Lebanese villages.
With Aoun supervising efforts, the LAF launched Operation Fajr al-Joroud (Dawn of the Outskirts). Over several days, soldiers removed the jihadists from 80-120 sq.km of Lebanese territory, killing 35 militants in the process and uncovering a tunnel network. Their efforts were praised internationally.
When Lebanon's economic crisis hit in 2019, the value of the Lebanese pound plummeted, with a huge impact on the purchasing power of public sector salaries. This cut down soldiers' salaries to about $100 per month. That year, massive protests gripped the country. Groups like the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) urged Gen. Aoun to use force to suppress the demonstrations.
He was later praised for balancing the right to free speech with the need to maintain public order. He refrained from using excessive force, even when demonstrators blocked roads leading to the presidential palace, and instead focused on protecting the protesters, intervening only to prevent vandalism of private and public property.
