It is clear to everyone by now that the Taif Agreement that put an end to the war in 1989 introduced a constitutional framework that could have been solid, had it not remained just ink on paper. Instead, the post-war period solidified sectarian divisions in the political sphere, facilitated the rise of influential militias and gave rise to a hybrid system of security governance; not to mention foreign involvement: the presence of Syrian troops until 2005, followed by Iran’s more subtle but deeply entrenched influence that many Lebanese still view as a form of occupation.
A country emerging from a civil war with the declared goal of ending sectarianism therefore ended up doing nothing. All of this is to say that post-war Lebanon, despite the Taif Agreement, never became a genuine democracy: it is a procedural democracy on paper, but an autocracy in practice. A very clear example of this is the country’s electoral system: although general elections have been held regularly, they have consistently been preordained and not truly representative of the will of the people.
The next parliamentary elections, scheduled for May 2026 to elect all 128 members of Parliament, are already underway, but as long as they are held in this current political landscape, they will follow the same autocratic formula as the previous ones. There are three main reasons for this:
1. Hezbollah’s arms Can a democracy exist when one political party holds arms, assassinates opponents, intimidates voters and crushes rival campaigns. No democracy anywhere in the world can coexist with a state in which sovereignty is subverted.
2. An electoral law designed to keep the status quo Lebanon’s electoral law has been tailored to maintain an incumbent cartel in power. It has been carefully calibrated by governing parties, who function in a cartel-like manner, to guarantee the reelection of communitarian leaders and their MPs. This electoral law is a hybrid system combining proportional representation and preferential voting, implemented alongside gerrymandering ordered along confessional lines. What emerges from this is an electoral map that is, at its core, dysfunctional. On this map, votes are not weighed equally within districts and elected MPs do not represent the same number of voters. Representation is even unequal among voters of the same confession.
Let’s take an example: in Tripoli, there are approximately 71,000 Sunni voters per Sunni seat, while in the Bekaa there are only about 23,000 Sunni voters per Sunni seat.