A Lebanese legislator lodged a protest vote in his country’s presidential election on Thursday by choosing American Jewish socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
The eventual winner was Lebanon’s military commander Joseph Aoun, who defeated Sanders by a tally of 99 to 1.
Lebanon’s president is elected by its 128-seat parliament, not a popular vote among the general electorate. The legislature has been deadlocked for two years, struggling and failing to elect a president 12 times. The country has therefore lacked a president since the previous holder of the office, Michel Aoun, completed his term in October 2022.
The voting process is conducted in two rounds, with a two-thirds majority of 86 votes normally required in the first round. If a winner is not determined, the second round requires only a simple majority of votes.
Joseph Aoun (no relation to his predecessor) was technically ineligible to run for president, since he was the sitting commander of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), but he was the only candidate that seemed to have a chance of winning in Lebanon’s bitterly divided and utterly dysfunctional political environment. He was therefore given a special exemption from the rules to run for president, but was required to obtain a two-thirds majority on the second round of voting to win.
A big part of the reason Lebanon’s presidency has been vacant for two years is that the Iran-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah, which is also one of Lebanon’s strongest political parties, refused to support anyone who was acceptable to the other powerful factions.
Hezbollah was badly weakened after attacking Israel, however, with much of its leadership crippled by exploding pagers and cell phones in September and its top boss Hassan Nasrallah eliminated by an Israeli bunker buster bomb soon afterward.
Hezbollah evidently no longer felt strong enough to stymie the presidential election, but some of its members and political allies still did not want to vote for Aoun, so they wrote in various protest votes, knowing that the names of their bogus “candidates” would be read out loud during the vote count.
Some Lebanese members of parliament (MPs) used their protest votes to make statements, such as one wag who voted for “O Pity My Homeland,” and another who voted for “Sovereignty and the Constitution.” For some reason, one of the MPs decided to cast a vote for Bernie Sanders. The ballot is cast in secret, so there was no way to know who the Sanderista was.
“Sanders won another term in the Senate last November but, for multiple reasons, is ineligible to lead Lebanon,” the Jerusalem Post archly noted.
Among those reasons is that Lebanon reserves different government leadership posts for its three major religions and the president must be a Maronite Christian. The minimum age for the presidency is 21, a bar easily cleared by the 83-year-old Sanders, but Lebanese citizenship is mandatory.
Al Jazeera editor Saad Abedine was not amused by these hijinks and it seems like a safe bet the people of Lebanon would not laugh either, as they have suffered tremendously under their Iran-influenced, terrorist-haunted, corrupt, completely dysfunctional government. To underline that point, Abedine was even more irked by the lawmaker who voted for Michel Aoun, the departed president whose “term was an utter disaster for Lebanon.”
Aoun betrayed no sign of concern about the threat posed by Bernie Sanders to his election prospects when he took office on Thursday. He sounded a few nationalist notes about damage inflicted by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) while fighting Hezbollah, but also said he was determined to disarm Hezbollah so it would no longer be a threat to Israel. He promised to move quickly on naming a prime minister, who must be a Sunni Muslim under Lebanon’s system.
The Israeli government congratulated Lebanon for making a good choice with Aoun, and hoped for “good neighborliness” under his leadership. U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Lisa Johnson said she was “very happy” with Aoun as president.
Iran sent a polite message of congratulations to the new president, but Hezbollah members in the Lebanese parliament sat on their hands during Aoun’s acceptance speech, probably including the disappointed Bernie Sanders supporter.
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