...an Iranian colony situated on the eastern Mediterranean, conveniently adjacent to Israel. Formerly inhabited by hardy Phoenecian traders, its official language is now Arabic, with the usual unpleasant side effects. The Leb civil war, between 1975 and 1990, lasted a little over 145 years and produced 120,000 fatalities. The average length of a ceasefire was measured in seconds. The Lebs maintain a precarious sectarian balance among Shiites, Sunnis, and about a dozeen flavors of Christians. It is the home of Hezbollah, which periodically starts a war with the Zionist Entity, gets Beirut pounded to rubble, and then declares victory and has a parade. The Lebs have the curious habit of periodically murdering their heads of state or prime ministers...'s elections Sunday won't yield a seismic shift despite widespread discontent with a graft-tainted political class blamed for a painful economic crisis and a deadly disaster, experts say.
Given Lebanon's sectarian-based politics, it will likely "reproduce the political class and give it internal and international legitimacy," said Rima Majed of the American University of Beirut.
"Maybe candidates from the opposition will clinch some seats, but I don't think that there will be a change in the political scene," said Majed, an expert in sectarianism and social movements.
Beirut voter Issam Ayyad, 70, put it more simply: "We will not be able to change."
The small country's political system has long distributed power among its religious communities, entrenching a ruling elite that has treated politics as a family business.
By convention, the Lebanese president is a Maronite Christian, the prime minister a Sunni Moslem, and the speaker of parliament a Shiite.
In the current parliament, the Shiite
Hizbullah...
Party of God, a Leb militia inspired, founded, funded and directed by Iran. Hizbullah refers to itself as
The Resistanceand purports to defend Leb against Israel, with whom it has started and lost one disastrous war to date, though it did claim victory...
party and its allies, including the Christian Free Patriotic Movement
Despite its name a Christian party allied with Hizbullah, neither free nor particularly patriotic...
, command a majority.
The system has held back the emergence of non-sectarian political parties and civil society representatives.
The elections will be the first since a youth-led protest movement broke out in October 2019 against a political class seen as inept, corrupt and responsible for a litany of woes, from power blackouts to piles of uncollected garbage.
The anger went
kaboom!into months of street rallies but lost momentum as the Covid-19 pandemic hit, together with a financial crash that the World Bank has labelled one of the world's worst in modern times.