From Feudal Lords to Zaiims: The continuity of clientelism in Lebanon

Every few years, Lebanon stages the familiar ritual of democracy. Posters bloom across Beirut’s walls, candidates promise reform, and citizens line up to vote under the flag of change. Yet the morning after each election, the country wakes to the same faces, the same surnames, and the same paralysis. If elections are supposed to renew power, why does nothing ever change? The answer lies in a simple truth: Lebanon’s political system never truly left feudalism behind. It merely draped itself in democratic symbols.

The clientelist culture of Lebanon can trace its roots to Lebanon's own feudal past. Mount Lebanon was governed by the local aristocratic clans such as the Arslans, the Jumblatts, the Khazens and Shihab during the Ottoman period. These local lords ruled semi-autonomous fiefs, collecting taxes and dispensing protection to the peasants who tilled their lands. Those peasants were loyal to their lord and not the empire, with any mediation between the latter and the peasants done by said local lords in their name.

Even as revolts and civil strife shook Lebanese lands in the nineteenth century, this social order endured. The collapse of the Ottoman empire, failed to bring change as the new regime, the French Mandate, found it convenient to govern through these same families. And with the independence in 1943, the feudal Hierarchy only saw a cosmetic change, replacing the empire’s tax farm with ministries and Parliamentary seat. The feudal lord became the Zaiim, a local lord who controls the flow of government Favors instead of dispensing agricultural tithes.

This cosmetic change can also be seen in the everyday political parties. Contrary to political parties seen around the world, that can be defined as an ideological organization bound by shared principles, the political parties in Lebanon act more like family enterprises, cantered around a main figure whose authority derive only from being part of the lineage of the previous Leader.

Their followers, meanwhile, function as the modern equivalent of vassals. They depend on their leaders for jobs, for protection, for the swift resolution of bureaucratic obstacles that the state, by design or neglect, never manages to remove. In return, they offer loyalty, votes, and an unspoken promise to defend their patron’s interests, even when those interests diverge from their own.

The worst of all was that The National Pact of 1943 and the Taif Agreement of 1989 codified this arrangement by dividing political offices along sectarian lines. Each community got its own institutional fief: the presidency for Maronites, the premiership for Sunnis, the speakership for Shiites, and so on. One might even go so far as to say that the Lebanese politician functions less as a legislator than as a broker, an intermediary who trades access to the state for personal allegiance. Today, clientelism governs nearly every interaction between Lebanese citizens and their state, where nothing is guaranteed without the right connection. According to Arab Barometer (2022), nearly 95% of Lebanese say that finding a job without “wasta”, is nearly impossible, revealing just how normalized patronage has become in the labour market.

Even international assistance flows through these networks, inadvertently transforming foreign donors into tributaries of the clientelist order. This allows each crisis affecting the Lebanese population to strengthen the Clientelist structure, reminding people that only through the patron can salvation be found, entrenching the belief that the state has no meaningful role to play.

If clientelism is the system's machinery, sectarianism is its fuel, turning identities into dependency. The citizen is first and foremost a member of a sect that operates as a micro-state with its own welfare channels, militias, and parties. This gives Lebanese sectarianism a unique ability, to transform corruption into a perceived necessity, where individuals, in order to feel protected within a fragmented society, must themselves take part in it. The result is a self-perpetuating cycle where fear sustains loyalty, loyalty sustains clientelism, and clientelism sustains the very fears that make it indispensable.

And while clientelism can provide short term stability, it corrodes the very notion of citizenship. It teaches people to seek Favors instead of clamouring for their rights, forcing dependence instead of participation. How can a democracy survive when every vote is repayment for service given and every reform a threat to someone livelihood?

The answer is simple: it can’t! Hence, we can safely summarize that Lebanon’s problem is not solely due to corruption but to a moral economy that equates loyalty with survival.

Clientelism is the living descendant of Lebanon’s feudal past, the invisible thread tying the peasant’s obedience to the voter’s loyalty. It survived empires, wars, and revolutions because it adapts better than any ideology or constitution. The republic’s institutions may carry the symbols of democracy, but their spirit remains medieval: hierarchical, personal, and hereditary.

But even systems built on dependence can, in time, breed their own awakening. By driving generations abroad, clientelism exposed countless Lebanese to societies where merit outweighs loyalty and citizenship replaces patronage. Armed with civic consciousness, the diaspora returns home with new expectations of governance and responsibility, planting seeds of change in a weary land through their remittances, initiatives, and ideas. Ironically, the very system that exiled its brightest minds now faces the return of Lebanon’s prodigal sons and daughters, bearing the light of change to a land long dimmed by servitude.