In Today’s Election, Lebanon’s Left Has a Chance to Challenge the Establishment
Ahead of today’s general election, a left-wing coalition has organized to challenge Lebanon’s sectarian elite. The progressive opposition movement, Citizens in a State, is seeking to rebuild the country through a radical redistributive agenda.
People cast their ballots at a polling station during general elections in Beirut, Lebanon, May 15, 2022. (Houssam Shbaro / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Today, Lebanese citizens will go to the polls to elect their new parliament. The elections come at a time of immense crisis for Lebanon — the country is going through an unprecedented financial meltdown, described by the World Bank as one of the world’s worst economic crises in 150 years. The value of the national currency, the lira, has depreciated by more than 80 percent since 2019, leading to skyrocketing prices for food, fuel, and consumer goods, and decimating depositors’ bank accounts.
The source of the collapse is no mystery. Decades of corruption and mismanagement, combined with the hollowing out of the state and productive economic sectors by the post–civil war neoliberal political class, has led to a situation in which Lebanon’s rentier economy cannot function for anyone except the oligarchs in charge.
The Causes of the Crisis
Lebanon is one of the most unequal countries in the world. A 2021 study by the Carnegie Middle East Center estimated that between 1990 and 2016, the top 1 percent of the population owned 45 percent of the wealth, with the bottom 50 percent accounting for less than 5 percent. In the 2010s, Lebanese billionaires’ wealth amounted to 23 percent of the country’s total income, a rate higher than in the United States and comparable to that of Russia. Most of Lebanon’s tax income comes from VAT charges and international tariffs, with low personal income tax rates, leaving millionaires and billionaires rich and the state underfunded.
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