One of the main reasons why some Lebanese no longer believe in the state is that they no longer believe in those who are supposed to represent it. Divorce between people and institutions is not only due to corruption, financial bankruptcy, collapse of public services or repeated crises. It also results from a much deeper problem: the legitimacy of the institutions. A State is not limited to territory, constitution or administration. It really exists only when citizens feel that those who exercise power do so on their behalf. But this bond has gradually broken.
One of the singularities of the Lebanese system is that almost all political legitimacy is concentrated in the hands of a single institution: Parliament. Citizens only elect their deputies directly. From this election alone, everything else is built. The deputies elect the President of the Republic. They also elect the Speaker of their own House. The President of the Council of Ministers is appointed following compulsory parliamentary consultations, and the Government must obtain the confidence of the same House in order to perform its functions fully. Finally, it is still the deputies who vote the laws, but also the electoral law according to which they will again seek the votes of the Lebanese.
Parliament is therefore not simply one of the powers of the State. He became the source of almost all others. He appoints the Head of State, determines the birth of executive power, chooses his own president and sets the rules for his own renewal. Few democracies so concentrate the production of political legitimacy in the hands of a single assembly.
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Such concentration would not necessarily be problematic if this assembly faithfully reflected the popular will. This is precisely where the heart of the problem lies.
The parliamentary majority does not always correspond to the popular majority. The combination of constituencies, denominational distribution of seats, electoral lists, preferential voting and political alliances can lead to a majority of deputies who do not represent the majority of the votes cast at national level. This phenomenon is not specific to Lebanon, but it is of particular importance because all institutional architecture is then based on this parliamentary majority.
The lack of representation thus spreads to the whole state. A parliamentary majority, which is an imperfect expression of popular will, elects the President of the Republic, participates in the appointment of the President of the Council of Ministers, gives or withdraws its confidence in the Government and retains control over the electoral rules governing its own re-election. What was initially only a gap between the popular vote and the composition of Parliament gradually becomes a lack of legitimacy for all the institutions.
To this is added a second phenomenon, which is even more worrying: the gradual disconnection of parliamentarians with their voters.
The MP should be the representative of a territory and its inhabitants. He should be accountable to them throughout his term of office, defend their interests and answer his votes to those who elected him. In fact, the link between the elected candidate and the citizen has been considerably weakened. Many MPs owe their careers more to their party, their political leader or to community balance than to a real anchor among voters. Once the elections have passed, citizens often do not know who to hold accountable, while parliamentarians respond first and foremost to coalition logics that ensure that they remain in power.
This situation eventually produces a profound democratic fatigue. Voters feel that their vote rarely changes the real balance. Many vote out of community loyalty, others out of resignation, some abstain, and an increasing number simply chooses to leave the country. When citizens no longer believe that their vote can influence the functioning of the institutions, they gradually cease to regard them as their own.
That is why I believe that a reform of parliamentary representation is essential.
Each Member should be elected in a single constituency for which he or she would become personally responsible. Citizens will know who represents them and who can judge their actions at the end of their term of office. The election would return to its primary function: to create a direct link between a representative and the citizens who give him their voice.
This reform should be accompanied by the de-confessionalisation of the election of deputies. Voters should no longer vote for lists composed of seats previously distributed among communities, but freely choose the person they consider most competent to represent them. The MP would then represent all the inhabitants of his constituency and not the only denomination to which his seat is assigned. Community guarantees could, as already provided for in the Taif agreements, be provided by a Senate, allowing the Chamber of Deputies to become a real political assembly.
However, this crisis in representation is only the result of a much older development.
We often tend to start our difficulties in 2019, with financial collapse. Others date back to 2005, 2000 or the end of the civil war. In my view, the roots of the problem are older and date back to the 1960s.
This period continues to be presented as a golden age in Lebanon. It is true that the country was experiencing strong growth, a dynamic banking sector, prosperous tourism and considerable cultural influence. But it was also during these years that several mechanisms were institutionalized that would permanently weaken the state.
The first is a Bank of Lebanon with extremely wide autonomy. The independence of a central bank is a principle accepted in most modern economies. But when it is not accompanied by strong controls, transparency and accountability, it can lead to excessive concentration of monetary power. Over the decades, the Bank of Lebanon has become an actor whose decisions were taking place throughout the country without institutional counter-powers evolving at the same pace.
The second is the development of exclusive agencies. Presented as a means of protecting certain economic sectors, they have gradually favoured situations of rent for a limited number of actors, strengthening an economy based more on privileges than on competition.
The third is the Cairo Accord of 1969. Without being solely responsible for the civil war, they have devoted a first exception to the fundamental principle that the State holds the monopoly of force. By accepting that an armed organization has military autonomy in Lebanese territory, they have opened a breach that will continue to expand.
These three developments belong to different fields. Yet they reflect the same logic: that of a State that begins to delegate or abandon part of its fundamental prerogatives. In one case, it renounces effective control over monetary power. In another, it protects from economic annuities. In the third, he accepted a limitation of his monopoly on the law enforcement system.
The organizations that subsequently replaced the state, from civil war militias to Hezbollah, did not create this weakness; They’re engulfed in it. They occupied the space left vacant by a public authority which was gradually losing its capacity to perform its functions alone, whether it was sovereign, social or economic. The more the state retreated, the more necessary parallel structures became. And the more indispensable they became, the more legitimate the state lost.
The collapse of 2019 did not therefore constitute the beginning of our crisis. It was the most spectacular consequence. When banks stopped returning deposits, when the currency collapsed and public services virtually disappeared, many Lebanese understood that the institutions no longer offered them protection or recourse. The breakdown of confidence was then consumed.
Rebuilding Lebanon will, of course, involve reorganizing public finances, reforming the banking sector and restoring state authority throughout the country. But none of these reforms will produce lasting effects if citizens continue to consider that those who exercise power no longer represent them.
The real reconstruction must therefore first be institutional. It will be necessary to re-establish a direct link between voters and their representatives, to rebalance power, to strengthen counter-powers and to ensure that institutions are brought back from popular will rather than from political balances that have become largely autonomous.
For the real danger is not only that a state is weak.
The real danger is that it will cease to be recognised as the state of its own citizens.
