On the evening of August 4, 2020, a massive explosion shook Lebanon's capital of Beirut, leaving an estimated 300,000 people homeless, thousands injured, and around two hundred dead. It was by far the most destructive explosion on record for the city despite having endured civil wars and invasions

Under the current confessional system, representative democracy in Lebanon suffers from a double crisis. At the institutional level, the prolonged presidential and cabinet vacancies combined with the slowness of the governmental machine reveal a considerable efficiency deficit. At the structural level, the current electoral representative system increasingly supports the organization of an oligarchic Lebanese regime where the concentration of power in a small number of people serves to benefit the interests of the confessional political elite. In this paper, I consider the establishment of a randomly selected senate as an alternative political answer to the crisis facing representative democracy in Lebanon. I identify the structural and political inadequacies of one of the dominant proposed resolutions, the “referendum solution,” to deal with the current representative crisis. I argue that the introduction of sortition in Lebanese political procedures could be considered an evolution toward further deliberative democratization of the system.

To maintain political stability and to preserve the plurality and the diversity that characterise its societies, consociational democracies require, more than other states, a grand coalition government. In this type of democracy, the grand coalition is not a model that is used in exceptional cases, as in majoritarian democracies. It is a deliberate and permanent political choice. In Lebanon, following the modifications implemented by the 1989 Ṭā’if Accord, the Constitution instituted a collegial power-sharing within the executive that implies the establishment of a grand coalition which enables the political participation of the main Lebanese religious confessions in the government. On the other hand, the formation of the Lebanese Council of ministers since the spring of 2005 has become increasingly difficult and coalitions are often less stable than in the past. These laborious negotiations for unstable governmental coalitions are especially problematic in what may be called the perversion of the constitutional procedure by leaders of the parliamentary blocs.

The confessional power-sharing mentality that governs the functioning of the Lebanese State apparatus has succeeded in imposing, over the years, many unwavering practices relating to the appointment of senior public officers. At the level of executive power, these confessional ‘constitutional conventions’ exacerbate the inequality between the different religious sects, where a de facto monopolisation within the so-called ‘Sovereign Ministries’ continues to be seen, ever since the Taif Agreement and reinforced by the Doha Accord. Furthermore, Lebanese parliamentary blocs fight to obtain ‘service ministries’, which are often an integral part of the machinery of clientelism, for the purpose of providing more ‘favours’ to their political clients. In fact, the political representation of the different religious confessions within the state institutions of deeply divided societies such as Lebanon, is ensured and guaranteed by the adoption of the principle of political proportionality. Following this logic, preserving the religious balance within the Lebanese Cabinet is one of the key prerequisites of the political system’s stability, which is essential to the functioning of the Council of Ministers. Prerogatives of the executive power are no longer concentrated in the hands of a single person belonging to a given religious confession, but are exercised through a collegial cabinet, which includes the main various Lebanese communities. Nevertheless, this proportionality, which sought a better representation of the religious segments, is mitigated by a hierarchy within the cabinet due to several unconstitutional practices.