Hassan Diab (6 January 1959-) was Prime Minister of Lebanon from 21 January to September 2020, succeeding Saad Hariri and preceding Mustapha Adib.
Biography[]
Hassan Diab was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1959 to a Sunni Muslim family, and he became a career academic who published 150 articles and papers about engineering in scientific journals and at scientific conferences. He served as Minister of Education from 2011 to 2014 in Najib Mikati's government, and, in 2019, he was chosen to succeed the outgoing Saad Hariri as Prime Minister amid the Lebanese Revolution. While nominally an independent, Diab's support came entirely from the Hezbollah-allied parliamentary blocs and not from any of the parties from his own Sunni community. He formed a technocratic government which raised the government budget by $700 million, approved a financial rescue plan, and defaulted on a sovereign debt for the first time in the nation's history. On 10 August 2020, he resigned in the aftermath of deadly port explosions which killed 190 people and injured over 6,500, and he requested for President Michel Aoun to call for early parliamentary elections. On 31 August, Mustapha Adib was named as his successor.