Lebanon’s new president backed by Iran, Hezbollah
Election of former general ends lengthy leaderless impasse
Lebanon’s lawmakers elected Michel Aoun, an lran-backed politician and former general, as president Monday, ending more than two years the country has gone without a leader.
Aoun, 81, is an ally of Hezbollah, the Shiite militia and political party backed by Iran that has helped Syrian President Bashar Assad survive a five-year civil war on Lebanon’s border.
The vote for Aoun, by 83 of parliament’s 127 members, shows Iran-backed political factions shouldered past those aligned with Saudi Arabia, replacing Syria as Lebanon’s chief foreign power broker.
Aoun’s “victory now is a victory for Hezbollah and that alliance, and certainly a kind of black eye for Saudi Arabia,” said Paul Salem, vice president for policy and research at the Middle East Institute, a think tank in Washington.
Saad Hariri, a pro-Western and Saudi-oriented politician, formally endorsed Aoun last week after failing to garner enough support for the presidency. In return, Aoun is expected to appoint Hariri prime minister.
“It’s a power-sharing system,” Salem said. “In a way, the status quo will continue.”
U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby congratulated Lebanon on the election results.
“This is a moment of opportunity, as Lebanon emerges from years of political impasse, to restore government functions and build a more stable and prosperous future for all Lebanese citizens,” he said in a statement.
Asked later about Aoun’s support from Hezbollah, which the State Department has designated a terrorist organization, Kirby said, “Let’ see what decisions he makes, what kind of leadership he exudes as president.”
The U.S. routinely assesses its foreign assistance programs “and we will do that with Lebanon going forward,” Kirby said.
Aoun’s election drew immediate praise from a top adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
The adviser, Ali Akbar Velayati, described the choice as a victory for Iran and its allies in Lebanon, because the Lebanese president is “a very significant ring in the chain of the Islamic resistance,” according to Iran’s governmentowned Tasnim News Agency.
Aoun, in his first speech after becoming president, pledged to fight corruption and protect Lebanon from the fires raging around it, referring to the Syrian civil war, according to the Associated Press. He also promised to liberate contested territory under “Israeli occupation,” according to Hezbollah’s Al Manar-TV, apparently referring to territory Israel considers part of the Golan Heights conquered from Syria in 1967.
Lebanon has been without a head of state since May 2014, when then-president Michel Suleiman’s six-year term expired. Since then, 45 sessions to elect a new leader have failed because of political infighting, the AP reported.
Aoun, a French- and American-trained former military officer, is known affectionately in Lebanon as “The General.” He led the Lebanese Army during a years-long civil war against Syrian troops and Iranian-backed Hezbollah in the late 1980s. Aoun and his supporters lost, and he was forced into exile in 1991.
A constant critic of Hezbollah and Syria’s then-president Hafez Assad, Aoun returned to Lebanon in 2005 after the assassination of then-prime minister Rafiq Hariri. U.N. investigators blamed the murder on Hezbollah and Syria, which occupied Lebanon at the time.
Syria was subsequently forced by international pressure to withdraw from the country. But Aoun later reconciled with Hezbollah and visited Tehran.
There are even Web browser extensions that will block election news. One is called, simply, Remove All Politics from Facebook. And there’s I Haven’t Got Time for the ’Paign.
Another, called Social Fixer, can be used to filter out many things on social media, and developer Matt Kruse says the political filter is the most popular among his 300,000 users right now. “I expect political fatigue to last for quite some time,” he says. “One of the key features is that I update the filters in the background, so as new political terms come up in the news, users don’t have to do anything to continue having them filtered.”
The ugliness of the campaign certainly gets part of the blame for ramping up anxiety and fatigue — an American Psychological Association survey says more than half of adults say the election is a significant source of stress — but the very length of it has also turned people off. It’s like Christmas decorations going up at Walmart in mid-July.
And it seems endless, always tripping ahead: Nearly half of likely Florida voters say Sen. Marco Rubio’s re-election campaign is more about setting up another presidential bid in 2020 than serving the state, according to a Bloomberg poll. Even 28% who support him say that.
One downward-cycle result: While more people just throw up their hands, only the most committed are still yelling, and yelling ever more loudly to reach those who are turned off, thus turning off more people who really just want to watch two long-time losers playing joyfully in the World Series. “People who are highly partisan are more likely to be interested in politics and they’re less likely to be tired of it,” says Tom Hollihan, political communications professor at the University of Southern California. “People who are not so politically engaged, I’m sure they’re exhausted by the conversation, and they’re not actively seeking information at this point.”
It doesn’t have to be this way. A chart comparing the length of Matt Kruse, U.S. elections to others makes ours look like a triathlon compared to light workouts.
Many people are exhausted from trying, for so long, to be on their best behavior to avoid inadvertently inciting political arguments, says Rockville, Md.-based psychologist Mary Alvord. “There is a lot of tiptoeing around,” she says.
And we are tiptoeing at home, work, kids’ soccer games, social events and more.
“The story has permeated every aspect of our life,” says Vaile Wright, a clinical psychologist and director of research and special projects at the American Psychological Association. “You can’t get away from it.”
Nearly half of workers said they were more likely to discuss politics in the workplace this election season than in the past, according to an American Psychological Association survey taken in August. About a quarter witnessed or overheard their coworkers arguing about politics and about 1 in 10 have gotten into an argument themselves.
Like those folks in Fort Myers last weekend, people in swing states are being inundated with political ads, which amplifies the exhaustion factor, Wright says. “It wears you out,” she says.
Some people even believe it has worn out the stock market. The Dow Jones Industrial Average is basically just where it was two years ago. When asked if the market’s flat performance was the result of investor election exhaustion or the campaign zapping energy out of the market or a sign investors want the slugfest to be over, Gary Kaltbaum, president of Kaltbaum Capital Management, shot back this email: “Yes. Yes. And Yes. Very tired.”
And Donald Luskin, chief investment officer at TrendMacro, a financial research firm, zapped out a recent report to clients titled, “Let’s Talk About Something Other than the Election.”
How ’bout those Indians? USA TODAY Network reporters Laura Petrecca, Adam Shell, Roger Yu and Karina Shedrofsky of USA TODAY; David Dorsey of The (Fort Myers, Fla.) News-Press contributed to this article.