Between a successful Pact and failed practice: Why Lebanon needs an updated National Pact?

Eighty years after Lebanon’s independence, the National Pact of 1943 still hovers over every debate about power-sharing, identity, and sovereignty. But today; after wars, occupations, and the rise of armed non-state actors; the Pact is no longer merely strained: it has collapsed under the weight of regional geopolitics and internal paralysis. What remains is a symbolic memory of an agreement that once balanced Lebanon’s dual identity but can no longer sustain a functioning state.

A founding contract built on compromise

The National Pact was never written down. It was a political agreement between President Bechara El-Khoury and Prime Minister Riad Al-Solh at the moment of independence. It is also important to mention the role of a political movement led by Yusef El Sawda, a founding father of Lebanon in 1920. Its logic was simple: Christians renounced foreign protection, especially from France, and Muslims renounced dreams of unity with Syria. Lebanon would be “neither Eastern nor Western,” a sovereign state with Arab affiliation and a distinct character.

Domestically, the Pact established a Consociational formula that included all major communities in governance. The Maronite assumed the presidency, the Sunni the premiership, and political representation was distributed proportionally. This system sought to prevent domination by any single sect and institutionalized coexistence as the core of the Republic.

For two decades, the Pact provided a workable framework. But it had one fatal weakness: it depended on regional stability and mutual trust among Lebanese communities; two conditions that historical events, starting 1948, would quickly obliterate.

Arab nationalism, Palestinians, and the unraveling of the pact

By the late 1950s and 1960s, the Arab world was transforming under the influence of Nasserism, Baathism, and Cold War alignments. Lebanon; small, open, and deeply connected to regional politics; became a theater for these ideological battles. Alignments with Nasser, contestation over foreign policy, and competing visions of Lebanon’s national identity eroded the delicate balance of the Pact. Some scholars describe the event of 1958 as the first bloody contestation of the dead formula.

Another rupture came after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Palestinian armed organizations relocated major operations to Lebanon, culminating in the Cairo Agreement of 1969, which granted the PLO freedom to operate militarily from Lebanese territory. For the first time since independence, a non-Lebanese armed actor was granted a formalized role in Lebanese politics. This introduced a parallel authority, destabilized the internal equilibrium, and stripped the Pact of its most essential principle: exclusive Lebanese sovereignty.

Throughout the early 1970s, Lebanon’s “Neutrality” became identical to open-ended militancy. Inter-Arab conflicts, Palestinian factions, and ideological polarization shattered any possibility of the neutrality envisioned in 1943. By 1975, Lebanon’s communities no longer shared a common interpretation of the Pact, and violence became the sole arbiter of political disputes.

Violence, Syrian intervention, and the failure of Taif

The 1989 Taif Agreement sought to revive and modernize the National Pact by redistributing executive authority, institutionalizing Christian–Muslim parity in parliament, and reaffirming coexistence as the core principle of the Lebanese state. Yet, despite its ambitious framework, Taif failed to confront the structural causes of the conflict it aimed to resolve. Compounding this failure was the fact that its implementation unfolded under direct Syrian occupation. As a result, many of its promised reforms remained unrealized, and the envisioned balance of power never emerged organically. Taif ultimately became a political façade: a document that proclaimed sovereignty while legitimizing foreign control.

Moreover, the concept of power-sharing in the post-Taif era was reduced to a simple distribution of state authority among pro-Syrian leaders, known collectively as the “Troika.” This arrangement generated a deep political crisis, as the three heads of state; the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister, and the Speaker of Parliament; effectively monopolised executive power. Their regular, quota-driven meetings became the primary mechanism for managing government affairs, bypassing constitutional institutions, particularly the Chamber of Deputies, the foremost representative of the people and the nation.

Inevitably, any disagreement within this trio was resolved through intervention by the Syrian “High Commissioner”, represented by General Ghazi Kanaan, known by his sobriquet “Abu Ya‘rub”, one of the most notorious symbols of repression during the period of Syrian tutelage over Lebanon.

A further and telling sign of Taif’s failure lies in the uninterrupted permanence of Nabih Berri as Speaker of Parliament. Since his first election in October 1992, Berri has held the post for more than thirty years. His continued re-election-even after profound economic collapse, the explosion at the Port of Beirut in 2020, and mass popular protests in 2019-speaks to the endurance of a political system resistant to change. In effect, the longevity of his tenure reflects not the achievement of the democratic and institutional vision outlined in Taif, but rather the entrenchment of sectarian clientelism, oligarchic control, and a system that privileges incumbency over renewal, an outcome entirely in total contradiction with the principles of the National Pact.

The Hezbollah era: A final blow to the pact

When Syria withdrew in 2005, Lebanon had a brief opportunity to reconstruct its institutions. Instead, another actor was already entrenched: Hezbollah.
Like the PLO, Hezbollah is a foreign actor with a transnational ideology acting as a local militia in the name of a historical Lebanese community, the Shi’a Twelvers. Its possession of arms outside state authority violates the core principle of the National Pact: that no community may dominate the others or monopolize force.

With a parallel army, a parallel foreign policy, and influence over state institutions, Hezbollah has pushed Lebanon beyond the logic of coexistence into a system defined by asymmetry and coercion. In this reality, the Pact’s guarantee of consensual governance is impossible.

New formula

I believe nostalgia is a dangerous illusion; it blinds us to the urgent reforms Lebanon desperately needs. Only courageous statesmanship and a new national formula born from the lessons of eighty years can break the cycle of collapse.

Lebanon does not need to deny its past; it needs to transcend it. If the leaders of 1943 built a pact for Lebanon 1.0, then the leaders of today must build a pact for Lebanon’s survival in 2025 and beyond; on one essential condition: to honor the spirit of the original National Pact while crafting a more effective formula for coexistence.