The Lebanese Political Dynasties: “the fine-tuning”

Abstract

A small in size, Lebanese Republic is known for it’s a confessional segmentation, a clan orientation and a predominant heredity of the local political elite. A oligarchic nature of a political regime of the country of cedars is due to a traditional clan structure of a lebanese society. For centuries, a leading role in Lebanon was played by the territorial-confessional clans, that wereheaded by the sheikhs–zaims (zuama). This system has migrated to a modern lebanese politics. At the same time, it has the support among both a old one and a new one elite. Therefore, a clear understanding of the involvement of the leaders of the power structures of the Lebanese Republic in a certain political dynasty is necessary for understanding a current state of affairs in the country, as well as to predict the nature of its further political development. So, the primary criterion, which was determines the sequence of the coverage of the activity of the political dynasties of the country of cedars is the degree of the influence on a today’s Lebanese realities of one or another of the current “zaims”. Based on this principle, we will talk about a a family-clan context of the first three persons of the state: the Prime Minister, the President (Speaker) of the National Assembly and the President of Lebanese Republic, as well as a few of the other leaders of the influential or at least the appreciable political forces, that are represented in parliament, which was elected in 2018 (except of H. Nasrallah and S. Geagea). In particular, the article contains an analysis of the possibilities of the creating the political dynasties by the current Prime Minister N. Mikati and Speaker of Parliament N. Berri, the prospects for a further existence of the newly founded political dynasties of the families of Aoun and al-Hariri, as well as the reasons for a political survival of the hereditary Lebanese zaim families Jumblatt and Frangieh. The main conclusion of this publication is the statement about a prospect of a total preservation of the principle of the nepotism in a lebanese politics for at least the coming decades.