Political Inclusion in the New Lebanon and New Syria: Challenges and Opportunities

March 3, 2025

Lina Khatib, Associate Fellow, Middle East and North Africa Program, Chatham House

This article was commissioned under the Resilience and Inclusive Politics in the Arab Region Project funded by the Carnegie Corporation.
 

Lebanon and Syria are going through an unprecedented period of political transformation. For the first time since the end of the Lebanese Civil War, Lebanon elected a president, Joseph Aoun, and appointed a prime minister, Nawaf Salam, who represent the goals of the country’s October 2019 revolution, centered on good governance and economic and political reform. Syria is also finally free from the oppression of the ousted Assad regime, which had monopolized political life.

One of the goals immediately announced by Salam for Lebanon’s new government is the full implementation of the 1989 Taif Agreement, which includes moving away from political sectarianism. Next door in post-Assad, the country is undergoing a period of change that is bringing hope of permanently moving away from autocratic rule.

A key question in both countries is how they will navigate the sensitivities around inclusive politics during this time of historic change. Both Lebanon and Syria are multi-confessional countries. The notion of inclusion therefore inevitably underlines how the countries’ evolving governance will address the issues of sectarian representation.

But inclusion is also about representation of divergent political voices, having an open political process in which civil society plays a positive role, and providing a space for diverse communities to participate in politics regardless of age, ethnicity, religious belief, gender, or social background. This is something multiple Western officials have emphasized as important for Syria’s transition.

This commentary piece uses the challenges facing political inclusion in Syria today and Lebanon historically, as well as the opportunities presented by the transformations happening in both countries in 2025, to argue that political inclusion is about more than adopting a political system that guarantees diverse representation beyond sectarianism, and that is what is also needed are measures to hold socio-political behavior accountable. 

The Challenge of Bottom-up Islamism in Syria

In Syria under the Assads, there was no politics in the genuine sense of the word. The ruling Baath regime allocated power to selected individuals to maintain their loyalty. There were no real political opposition groups inside Syria. And although the regime peddled the narrative that it was protecting minorities and ruling Syria through a secular system, the reality was different. The state approached minorities through patron-client relationships where safety was granted in return for regime loyalty, while sectarianism infused state institutions informally. High-level positions in the Syrian Arab Army, for example, were mainly given to members of the Alawite community that the Assads came from.

One of the challenges facing post-Assad Syria is the belief by some Islamist members of Syria’s Sunni community that because Sunnis constitute 80% of the population they are entitled to design a new Sunni-led system in which Sunnis dominate other groups. Those exclusionary Islamists do not represent the majority of Syria’s Sunnis but their approach must not be dismissed because that would risk overlooking a potential hurdle to political inclusion in the long run. As those groups form part of the support base of the post-Assad administration in Syria, how Syria’s new leaders deal with the groups’ unrealistic expectations will have a direct impact on inclusion.  

The groups referred to here hail from Islamist jihadist backgrounds and believe that the rise of the Sunni Islamist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) to become the de facto ruler of Syria in the immediate post-Assad period is an opportunity to design a political system that appears inclusive to the outside world but that in reality consolidates Sunni dominance. For example, one of the ways in which they believe this can be achieved is by making Sunni Islamic religious practices a requirement for members of the Syrian army, as this would automatically deter minorities from seeking to join the army, leaving it to be populated by Sunni Muslims.

These groups believe that such a model could even encourage people from other religions or sects who want to achieve political influence or have a military role to convert to Sunni Islam. In the same vein, they see the timeline that the HTS-led administration announced regarding holding elections and drafting a new constitution as a good opportunity to spread their influence through soft power. They say that the 3-4 years in question allow for proselytizing across wider society so that by the time parliamentary elections happen most people will automatically vote for Islamists. In other words, they believe that top-down Islamization would put off the international community and would alarm Syria’s minorities, and that bottom-up Islamization would be a better way to allow Islamists to achieve their goals.

Syrian civil society has already expressed awareness of the presence of such elements in Syria’s socio-political landscape and is stepping up efforts to counter the spread of attempts at blocking inclusion. An example is the public outcry following reports that the post-Assad administration was going to revise the school curriculum to remove references to pre-Islamic figures. The administration responded by denying that such changes were going to happen and confirming that curriculum revisions would be the responsibility of a yet-to-be-appointed expert committee.

There are also calls by Syrian political groups from a variety of backgrounds for state institutions in Syria to have representation from multiple political parties. Many of those groups are aware of the importance of having visibility in this critical period and have stepped up their public activities in this regard, such as the conference held in Damascus in January 2025 by the Syrian Women’s Political Movement.

The Cautionary Tale of Lebanon’s Sectarian Political System

Lebanon comes to provide a cautionary tale for Syria due to Lebanon’s disastrous track record of having a sectarian-based political system.

The Lebanese model of allocating political seats based on sectarian background was intended to guarantee political inclusion for Lebanon’s major sectarian groups. The rationale was that a governing formula in which sects did not have to worry about having a seat at the political table would support long-term stability. But the decades during which this political system has been in place show that it did not prevent the country from descending into civil war in which sectarianism was one of the drivers.

The confession-based system also allowed sectarian leaders to prioritize the interests of their sects as well as pursue their individual interests instead of working in the national interest. This served to weaken the sense of national belonging in Lebanon and paved the way for sectarian leaders to reallocate state resources for extra-statal goals such as to sustain their patronage networks. An example is the use of civil service employment as a reward in return for people’s loyalty, in which sectarian leaders gave their constituents real or phantom civil service jobs. This caused government institutions to be inflated with underqualified and ghost employees, adding to public service inefficiency and draining state resources.

Political sectarianism in Lebanon also let sectarian affiliation overshadow merit. Even if someone was better qualified for a particular government position than another person from a different sect, the selection of who would get that position would in the end be decided on the basis of sect, not expertise. Sectarian identity also came to overshadow other characteristics like gender, adding another barrier for women’s entry into the political domain.

All this made it harder for those from outside the status quo to break into politics. In Lebanon’s last election in 2022, only ten percent of elected parliamentarians came from outside the ruling political parties.

Despite the well-documented flaws of the Lebanese model, it was used as a reference for the political system adopted in Iraq after the US-led invasion of 2003 which toppled the Saddam Hussein regime. As in Lebanon, political sectarianism in Iraq did not protect the country from sectarian-based violence and contributed to the rise in corruption among the country’s ruling elite as well as to the syphoning off of state resources.

Political Inclusion and Socio-political Behavior 

Syria today has the opportunity to replace the ousted Assad regime with a new political system that is inclusive yet avoids the caveats of the Lebanese and Iraqi cases. Lebanon also has the opportunity to move away from the shackles of political sectarianism. As the case of Syria illustrates, inclusion is not only about the political system but also about socio-political behaviour. Just as the Assad regime officially did not adopt sectarianism in the political system but implemented it implicitly, the Islamists referred to earlier in this piece also want to try to exert a de facto sectarian-based power grab in Syria.

Therefore, the presence of a political system not based on sectarianism or on ethnic quotas is not sufficient to guarantee inclusion. What is also needed are measures to hold socio-political behaviour accountable.

Here Lebanon comes to provide a useful framework. The Arab Barometer’s October 2024 Lebanon survey highlighted the severity of the crisis in the country just before Aoun’s ascent to the presidency. The survey results showed abysmal trust in the government and low satisfaction with its performance, as well as high apathy towards politics.[i]

Lebanon in 2025 can reverse those trends significantly. The October 2019 revolution in Lebanon called for an overhaul of the country’s political system and the implementation of wide-ranging reforms. The inaugural speech delivered by President Joseph Aoun adopted the key demands of the revolution, placing them as the framework with which Lebanon is to be governed.

For Lebanon and Syria to move towards political inclusion, all the principles raised in Aoun’s speech—which constitute principles of liberal democracy and good governance—must be implemented together. Those include equality for all citizens, freedom of expression, accountability and transparency in governance, and having an independent judiciary that guarantees individual and collective rights under the law. Aoun’s speech also notably underlined that implementing these measures can only be done through the joint efforts of parliament, the cabinet, the justice system, political parties, and civil society. Aoun rightly presented all this in context of a sovereign Lebanon in which the state exercises monopoly over violence and defence and where Lebanon sets its own political agenda.[ii]

Some of the principles presented by the Lebanese president were echoed in the early statements given by Syria’s new president Ahmad al-Sharaa, such as committing to state monopoly over violence and defence and to a Syria that sets its own political agenda,[iii] but Aoun’s speech is more comprehensive. As the timeline of the political transformation in Lebanon is ahead of that in Syria, the positive changes committed to during Aoun’s presidential term can serve as a guide for the transition in Syria.