President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) Nawaf Salam has been chosen as the Prime Minister of Lebanon by the country’s President Joseph Aoun. He was elected Prime Minister on Monday (January 13). A majority of the country’s lawmakers supported Joseph Aoun during earlier consultations.
News agency Reuters and Qatar-based media Al-Jazeera reported this news.
The election of Joseph Aoun as president and the nomination of Nawaf Salam as prime minister ended more than two years of deadlock in the country’s government. The Lebanese presidency has been vacant since October 2022. Apart from this, till now the country’s cabinet was managed on the basis of supervisory capacity.
After strong pressure from Saudi Arabia, Joseph Aoun was elected president by voting in the Lebanese Parliament last Thursday (January 9). And after that, the discussion on the nomination of the country’s next prime minister began.
Nawaf Salam has been a candidate for the post of prime minister twice in recent years. He is widely known as a reformist. He is a Sunni Muslim. And only Sunni Muslims can be prime minister of Lebanon.
The judge rose to international prominence last year by presiding over South Africa’s genocide case against Israel and other tribunals after being elected head of ICZ. Salam’s nomination for prime minister is a major blow to Lebanon’s armed group Hezbollah and its ally, the Shiite political party Amal.