After a two-year vacancy, Lebanon finally has a president. On January 9, Joseph Aoun was swept into office as its fourteenth holder to Lebanese and international acclaim. More importantly, if less glamorously, Lebanon has also selected a prime minister-designate to form a cabinet. Nawaf Salam—a former Palestine Liberation Organization and Fatah militant turned Lebanese diplomat who also served as president of the International Court of Justice—is now expected to assume the premiership. As the head of Lebanon’s true executive authority, lifting the country out of its compounding crises—not the least of which is the question of what will become of Hezbollah and its arms—will fall upon Salam. 

His chances of success are far from clear. What is clear is that given Lebanon’s dire economic state, its postwar reconstruction needs, and the balance of political power in the country, Salam is highly unlikely to meaningfully confront Hezbollah and risk escalating internal conflict during his premiership.

The powers of the prime minister

Under Lebanon’s pre-civil war constitution, the presidency—earmarked by convention for a Maronite, the country’s dominant Christian sect—was Lebanon’s preeminent and most powerful office. The Taif Agreement of 1989, which ended the Lebanese Civil War, amended the constitution and shuffled Lebanon’s balance of power to better accord with the best estimate of the country’s new demographic realities. In part, it expanded the power of the Sunni-designated post of prime minister and his cabinet at the presidency’s expense—creating a balance between two offices that would now operate as mutual counterweights. 

Today, according to the Lebanese constitution, the cabinet “set[s] the general policy of the State in all domains, draws up bills and organizational decrees,” and “Oversees the implementation of laws and regulations, and supervises the activities over all the State’s institutions, including civil, military, and security administrations and institutions without exception.” If he cobbles together a cabinet and then gains the parliament’s confidence within thirty days, Salam will become the latest beneficiary of that expanded power. 

Lebanon’s political landscape

But Salam and his cabinet are unlikely to usher in fundamental changes. 

Lebanon’s next parliamentary elections are set for May 2026. Salam therefore has a year and a half, at most, to tackle a wide range of issues, from a collapsed economy and poor infrastructure to security challenges, before his government dissolves by operation of law. His government will be responsible for fully implementing UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and the November 27, 2024, cease-fire deal with Israel. And Salam, who has not yet fully assumed the premiership, has already confronted and overcome a legitimacy crisis.

Salam’s candidacy won the support of eighty-four of Lebanon’s 128 parliamentarians. But that wasn’t supposed to happen. His predecessor and longtime ally of Hezbollah, Najib Miqati, was set to retake the office, reportedly as part of the guarantees and assurances that presidential candidate Aoun gave Hezbollah and the Amal Party—the so-called Shia duo—in exchange for backing Aoun’s election. When many of the parties that had seemingly committed to Miqati switched their votes at the last minute to Salam, first Hezbollah and then Amal responded by withholding their support. The pro-Hezbollah newspaper Al-Akhbar decried what it called a “total American coup” while the head of the group’s Loyalty to the Resistance parliamentary bloc, Mohammad Raad, angrily accused Salam’s backers of “sever[ing]” the conciliatory hand Hezbollah had extended by voting for Aoun.

The Shia duo thus denied Salam the backing of the only two representative parties of Lebanese Shias—likely the country’s largest and fastest-growing sect. Their statements also left it ambiguous as to whether they would join or support Salam’s government. While not constitutionally required, because Lebanon continues to operate on the basis of sectarian power sharing and consensus, convention would require Salam’s cabinet to have pan-sectarian support. Without it, the cloud of illegitimacy and “exclusion” of one of Lebanon’s constituent components would hang over his government. Salam and Aoun therefore reportedly scrambled to placate the Shia duo—with Salam sending them assurances that his designation wasn’t intended to exclude them, and Aoun stepping in to mediate.

Salam and the Shia duo appear to have smoothed matters over. Caught off guard, Hezbollah and Amal’s intransigence was only temporary political muscle-flexing to extract concessions or guarantees from Salam. This was a similar tactic to when they withheld their votes from Aoun during the first round of voting for the president on January 9. Whatever the eventual composition of Salam’s future government or the content of its policy statement, they sought to ensure that Salam would uphold the president’s assurances that were supposed to come through Miqati—and not move against Hezbollah, its arms, or its shadow state. 

To be sure, Salam is closer to a consensus candidate than the anti-Hezbollah pugilists Ashraf Rifi and Fouad Makhzoumi, the preferred candidates of the old-guard opposition and activist opposition, respectively, who withdrew in favor of Salam. Nevertheless, Salam is not a partner and known quantity like Miqati. And an unfriendly prime minister could theoretically initiate the process of disarming Hezbollah. After all, Lebanon’s armed forces are constitutionally “subject to the authority of the Cabinet”—and not the president, who is only their nominal commander. 

Toeing the line

But Salam was always unlikely to pick a fight with Hezbollah. Salam’s list of vital tasks is long, and his time in office could be short. The Shia duo are not marginal societal actors. Hezbollah alone won 356,122 of the 1,951,683 votes cast in the 2022 parliamentary elections—the most of any party by 150,000 votes—and two separate 2024 polls showed that 85-93 percent of Shias in Lebanon support the group. Amal won an additional 191,142 votes. At best, clashing with them would be met with the obstructionism and political paralysis at which the Shia duo—and especially Hezbollah—excels. At worst, given their popularity, it would be flirting with civil war. But their compliance, at minimum, would enable Salam and his government to pursue at least some of its goals.

Salam must steer Lebanon through economic recovery, update and upgrade the country’s decayed infrastructure, enact political and judicial reform, and begin the work of postwar reconstruction. These are heavy lifts for a normally functioning state, and for Lebanon they may be impossible—even without compounding these challenges by trying to disarm Hezbollah. Therefore, confronting the group will likely drop to the bottom of Salam’s priorities, if it isn’t absent from his agenda entirely.

The danger of Israel resuming its campaign against Hezbollah, the main inducement for Lebanon to act against the group, diminished considerably under international and US pressure with Aoun’s election. Pressure on Israel to refrain from escalating again in Lebanon is only likely to increase, including from the Trump administration, as Salam forms his government. Salam wouldn’t be the first Lebanese politician to deem it unwise to risk igniting a civil war by pushing to disarm Hezbollah to stave off a renewal of conflict between Hezbollah and Israel. Another Lebanese civil war could last at least a decade and would devastate the entire country. Another full-scale Israel-Hezbollah war, in contrast, is now unlikely to recur for years, would probably be relatively short-lived, and its destruction would likely fall largely on Hezbollah-dominated areas.

Reports indicate that Salam’s intended cabinet policy statement will mirror Aoun’s inaugural speech. Based on Salam’s own promise to “fully implement Resolution 1701 and all terms of the [November 27] cease-fire agreement,” it will likely incorporate Aoun’s promise to monopolize force in the hands of the Lebanese state. Some have interpreted these ambiguous words as a vow to disarm Hezbollah. But Lebanon has long interpreted these terms idiosyncratically to exclude disarming the group. As Salam proceeds with the formation of his government, and if he succeeds in securing his premiership, he is very likely to fall back on these interpretations to avoid a clash with Hezbollah that will transform his term into a paralyzed failure. 

David Daoud is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where he focuses on Israel, Hezbollah, and Lebanon affairs.

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Image: Lebanese Prime Minister-designate Nawaf Salam speaks at the presidential palace on the day he meets with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun, in Baabda, Lebanon January 14, 2025. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir