Beirut - Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun left the presidential palace Sunday without a replacement. The president ended his six-year term, leaving the small nation in a political vacuum that is likely to worsen its historic economic meltdown.

The country is currently being run by a caretaker government after Prime Minister-designate Najib Mikati failed to form a new Cabinet following May 15 parliamentary elections. Aoun and his supporters warn that such a government doesn’t have full power to run the country, saying that weeks of “constitutional chaos” lay ahead.

In a speech outside the palace, Aoun told thousands of supporters that he has accepted the resignation of Mikati’s government.

Many fear that an extended power vacuum could further delay attempts to finalize a deal with the International Monetary Fund that would provide Lebanon with some $3 billion in assistance, widely seen as a key step to help the country climb out of a three-year financial crisis that has left three quarters of the population in poverty.

While it’s not the first time that Lebanon’s parliament has failed to appoint a successor by the end of the president’s term, this will be the first time that there will be both no president and a caretaker cabinet with limited powers.

Lebanese are deeply divided over Aoun, an 87-year-old Maronite Christian and former army commander, with some seeing him as a defender of the country’s Christian community and a leading figure who tried to seriously fight corruption in Lebanon. His opponents criticize him for his role in the 1975-90 civil war and for his shifting alliances, especially with the Iran-backed Hezbollah, the country’s most powerful military and political force.

Aoun’s biggest achievement came last week. He signed a U.S.-mediated maritime border agreement with Israel that Beirut hopes will lead to gas exploration in the Mediterranean. That will presumably help Lebanon come out of its economic crisis that has been described by the World Bank as one of the worst the world has witnessed since the 1850s.

Under Lebanon’s power-sharing agreement, the president has to be a Maronite Christian, the parliament speaker a Shiite and the prime minister a Sunni Muslim. Cabinet and government seats are equally divided between Muslims and Christians. Christians, Sunnis and Shiites each make about a third of Lebanon’s 5 million people.
-AP