In Lebanon, questions are constantly asked about the reasons that allow politicians of immeasurable mediocrity and corruption to impose themselves and to remain in power in a country where the society has an extraordinary level of education, competence and dynamism.
The answers are often given in terms of the confessional issue and the divisions it implies, the clientelism that has continued to grow and to corrode all public administrations, sponsored by the leaders of war militias who have become ministers and deputies. Talks also evoked the Syrian regime’s hegemony that has "manufactured" politicians and infiltrated state institutions, assassinations, impunity, Hezbollah and its weapons that terrorize its opponents, and the electoral law and its “Gerry meandering” that favored the re-election of the same tenors and their henchmen. Finally, the repercussions of the regional crises on the Lebanese scene are regularly mentioned. They complicate the situation even more and leave the majority of the people in the frustration of impotence and the disarray of waiting for temporary solutions, often imported from the “outside”.
Nevertheless, is this enough to understand the increasingly striking gap between State and Society or between political elites and social or cultural actors in the country?
In my opinion, two elements or phenomena should be added to the existing analysis and above-mentioned answers and arguments.
The first element or phenomenon is part of what is called "the capture of the State". An operation that is defined by the takeover of government institutions by private interests to the detriment of the general interest. This can happen through various means, such as corruption, manipulation of elections and alliances, influence on the media, financing of political parties and notables, marginalization or weakening of the judiciary, and the introduction of the notion of "revolving doors", i.e., the appointment of senior state officials and politicians to work or board positions in private companies, in order to use them at the same time or later to promote or propel the interests of these companies.
A careful observation of what Lebanon has been going through in the last decades shows how much the state has been captured by the banking and politico-financial networks, and how much this capture has been reinforced through the different political-confessional equations and co-existed with the Syrian hegemony and then with the overpowering of Hezbollah and its security diktat.
The second element or phenomenon explaining the mentioned gap comes from the Lebanese society itself, which adapted during the long years of the war to the weak presence of the state, and which has since created its own management and regulation mechanisms. Its movements, organizations and individuals, characterized by success, resilience, creativity or the ability to innovate, have developed a contempt or even a disgust towards politics and especially towards its actors and "leaders". They have thus settled for building a parallel or alternative world to the "political world". Since their freedoms or raison d'être were rarely threatened, they could not be sufficiently motivated to mobilize or fight for large-scale political change. Indeed, this configuration of two parallel worlds has only been endangered twice in the last three decades: in 2005 and in 2019 during the popular uprisings that almost overturned the "stagnant order" and made politics more accessible. But these moments of mobilization and euphoria were fleeting, the system managed to regain the upper hand and preserve itself, despite the financial collapse followed by the explosion of the port of Beirut in 2020 which this time threw the state and society into a bottomless pit.
State capture and contempt are thus two more reasons for the Lebanese lag. In the current decadent situation, their intertwining creates a general feeling of humiliation that replaces the anger of a large part of the citizens to the point of making their capacity to manage their "parallel world" waver. For the looting, the economic oppression, and sometimes the exile, caused by unspeakably lowly officials, constitute a brutal reality, difficult to digest without being able to upset the existing political arrangement.
