The good news from Lebanon is that Hezbollah’s incumbent prime minister, Najib Mikati, has lost the race for another term, causing the Iran-backed Hezbollah militia to complain that it was being pushed out of the political process.
The bad news is that the one who got the call on Monday to form a cabinet was International Court of Justice President Nawaf Salam, whose staunch anti-Israel stances make it hard to imagine that he could lead Lebanon back to the 1949 truce with the Jewish state, let alone suing for peace and normalization.
The build up to Salam’s call started with the opposition bloc of 35 lawmakers nominating one of its own, Fouad Makhzoumi, to the position. The opposition has been the only bloc, in Lebanon’s 128-member parliament, to demand, out loud, the disarmament of Hezbollah. An independent bloc of 17 MPs nominated Salam.
“The smaller bloc should have endorsed Makhzoumi, but they did not budge,” Samir Geagea, the leader of the Lebanese Forces Party, the biggest bloc within the opposition told Alhadath channel. “Had we not endorsed their candidate, Salam, the result would have been another term for [Hezbollah’s candidate] Mikati.”
The 52 votes for Salam started snowballing. By the time lawmakers disclosed their choices to President Joseph Aoun, who had been elected president last week, Salam’s endorsement had reached 84 votes. Mikati received only nine. Seeing the defeat coming, the two Shia blocs of Hezbollah and Amal, with 30 votes, abstained from nominating anyone to the premiership. Aoun asked Salam to form a cabinet.
Hours after the nomination, Geagea gave his interview to Alhadath, in which he outlined how his coalition imagined the post-Hezbollah era: “President Aoun and Prime Minister Salam should sit with Hezbollah and tell them, ‘Listen, we are all Lebanese compatriots. Either ship your arms back to Iran or surrender them to the Lebanese army.” Geagea said that this was how all civil war militias, including his own, surrendered their arms in 1991.
But Salam brings to the Lebanese premiership a lot of global political baggage. While serving as Lebanon’s envoy to the UN, including two years as a non-permanent member at the Security Council, Salam bashed Israel dozens of times in his various speeches. As president of the International Court of Justice, Salam presided over accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, a highly controversial decision that top legal experts have disputed.
With Salam’s bias against Israel, it becomes hard to imagine that the UN judge would be the best fit to lead the process of disarming Hezbollah and restoring Lebanese sovereignty, let alone demarcating the land border and suing for peace and normalization.
Blue-blooded Salam family
Salam hails from a blue-blooded feudal family that rose to prominence with the rise of Beirut itself as a major port and Mediterranean city. His grandfather represented the Beirut Velayet in the Ottoman parliament in Istanbul and his uncle, Saeb, played a major role in the country’s politics – including as prime minister. Saeb became famous for smoking cigars and going around with a white carnation pinned to his lapel.
Like most Sunni Muslims in the Levant, whether in Lebanon, Syria or Palestine, Saeb Salam opposed the creation of those states. He led Beirut’s Sunni opposition in demanding that Lebanese join a Hashemite, pan-Arab kingdom, in Damascus, which proved to be short-lived. Saeb Salam later changed course and championed Lebanese nationalism against pan-Arabism.
Saeb Salam’s influence started shrinking as Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian militias dominated Lebanon, starting in 1969. But in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon to eject the Palestinian militias that were attacking its north, it was in Saeb Salam’s traditional mansion in the Lebanese capital where all Muslim and Druze leaders – usually the supporters of Arafat – gathered and demanded that the Palestinian chief and his militias leave the country to spare it further destruction.
Muslim Saeb Salam continued to lend political cover to Christian President Amin Gemayel in talks with Israel that resulted in parliament’s ratification of the May 17, 1983, Peace Agreement between the two countries. Syria’s Hafez Assad sent in his militias to blow up the deal. Salam went to live in exile in Europe.
Fence-sitter Nawaf Salam
While his uncle was lending a hand to Arafat’s ejection, young Nawaf stuck with the Palestinian chief – perhaps inspired more by his peers than by his family heritage. Nawaf Salam maintained his pro-Palestinian position for a long time, but in 2005, he stood as a proponent of the anti-Assad and anti-Hezbollah “March 14 coalition.” (The group’s name commemorated a massive protest – the biggest in the country’s history – one month after Prime Minister Rafic Hariri was assasssinated in 2005.) He was rewarded by being appointed Lebanon’s envoy to the UN, where he became friends with his American counterpart Susan Rice.
In 2008, the Hezbollah militia punished and finished off the March 14 coalition. But Salam, hedging his bets, stayed at the UN and started reporting to a pro-Hezbollah government in Beirut. He hoped that by staying on the fence he would eventually get a call to form a cabinet.
In 2019, the Lebanese who took to the streets in the “October 17 Revolution” protesting Hezbollah and corruption shouted Salam’s name. Since then he has been popular with the opposition and anti-establishment types. October 17 lawmakers were behind his getting the call on Monday.
But not everyone shouting Salam’s name is praising him. He has made a lot of enemies on the world stage. If he brings those animosities with him to the premiership, Lebanon’s global standing may end up suffering.
Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD). Follow him on X @hahussain
