1988-89: Rene Moawad and Elias Hrawi
As Amin Gemayel’s term was ending in August 1988, the Lebanese National Assembly failed to muster a quorum to elect a new president. Israel had since withdrawn its occupation force to south Lebanon. Christian Leaders and Syria, which had 25,000 troops in Lebanon, couldn’t agree on a compromise candidate. A constitutional vacuum, and outbreaks of bloody violence, ensued.
Muslims set up their own interim government under Prime Minister Selim al-Hoss, who’d been Gemayel’s prime minister. Michel Aoun, a Christian army general opposed to Syria’s presence, set up a military government: himself and two army officers.
As the crisis lengthened, 62 members of the National Assembly agreed to meet in the Saudi town of Taif to resolve Lebanon’s 14-year civil war and redraw the country’s political map. In October 1989, they reached an accord that reduced Christian power to parity with Muslims (from a 55 percent majority in the Assembly) and called on a limited redeployment of Syrian forces to the eastern part of the country.
Aoun, opposing the agreement, dissolved the Assembly. But by then he’d lost his power. The Assembly met—in a remote mountain village—on Nov. 5, 1989, and elected Rene Moawad president with 52 votes of just 58 deputies assembled. Moawad took office immediately. Seventeen days later, he was assassinated as a 400-pound bomb blew up his car and killed 23 other people.
Elias Hrawi, a wealthy Maronite from the eastern Lebanese town of Zahle, was elected president on Nov. 24 with what amounted to a minority vote of the National Assembly: 47 votes of 53 legislators, in an assembly of 99 representatives. To make the quorum, eight legislators who’d fled the civil war to Paris were flown in for the vote and driven, by Syrian intelligence agents, to the town of Shtaura, where the Assembly’s makeshift session was held. The shadows once again were those of Syrian guns, as the Syrian army occupied that town.
Gen. Aoun, who had counted Saddam Hussein among his allies, lost credibility and support once Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990 and Syria joined the American-led coalition to repulse the Iraqi army. Syria also got the green light from the United States to oust Aoun militarily. Aoun fled to Paris.
1998: Emile Lahoud
Hrawi’s presidency was scheduled to end in November 1995. It didn’t. The National Assembly gathered, this time in its own building in Beirut, and voted overwhelmingly, if casually, to amend the Constitution so Hrawi could serve three more years. The precedent had been set in 1949 with the extension of Bechara el-Khoury's presidency, after all. The National Assembly opted for a refresher course in diminishing the Constitution's meaning.
In 1998, Syria, still occupying Lebanon, gave its blessing to Lebanese Army Lt. Gen. Emil Lahoud to be Lebanon’s next president. Again, the Assembly had to amend the Constitution, which forbade a state employee from acceding to the presidency unless he resigned his post at least six months earlier. The amendment passed easily. Lahoud was elected. In 2004, the Assembly again amended the Constitution to lengthen his term by three years.
Lahoud’s term ends on Nov. 24. Constitutionally, the 128-member assembly (it grew from 99 as a result of the 1989 Taif accord) must elect a new president before then. But as documented above, the Lebanese Constitution is a document as malleable as the country’s political winds. So far, several attempts by legislators to settle on a compromise candidate have failed.
2007?
Hezbollah, the Shiite militant “Party of God,” which joined the political process with several members elected to the National Assembly in the 1990s, is boycotting the presidential balloting. Its choice for president: Gen. Michel Aoun, back from Paris. The so-called March 14 coalition of Sunni and other Christian legislators (so named after the day that triggered the Cedar Revolution and the ouster of Syrian occupation from Lebanon) refuse to join the Hezbollah-Aoun alliance but have yet to produce a compromise candidate.