Next 10 May, Lebanon will return to the polls for parliamentary elections: an appointment that is not a mere institutional fulfilment, but the most critical and transformative crossroads in recent Lebanese history.

For over three decades, Lebanon has remained prisoner of a paralysing institutional paradox: a confessional and formally pluralist constitutional system reduced to a screen for the privatisation of power and foreign policy by a single faction. Unlike other Mediterranean crisis contexts, the Lebanese anomaly does not lie in the absence of the state, but in its systematic snatching: institutions have been kept alive as empty shells for partisan and sectarian purposes, which have fostered a pattern of political servitude. In this framework, Hezbollah has acted as the main architect of this erosion of legitimacy, sacrificing the interest of the citizen on the altar of the ayatollahs’ dreams of glory, degrading the country to a mere Iranian strategic asset and exchanging formal stability for the seizure of national sovereignty.

The still bleeding wound of the Beirut port explosion on 4 August 2020 remains the plastic symbol of this systemic betrayal. That event was not a tragic fatality, but the catastrophic result of criminal logistical management that had turned the country’s most critical infrastructure into a free zone removed from the authority of the state. The violent obstructionism exercised against Judge Tarek Bitar, head of the investigation into the explosion, who was turned into the target of physical threats and an unprecedented judicial boycott, is but the latest act in a script that had already been written. The same method was used to boycott and render ineffective the UN Special Tribunal for the murder of Rafic Hariri. In that case as well, Hezbollah and its referents in Damascus chose the path of threat and institutional paralysis to protect their own apparatuses, confirming that the political class sees the truth not as an act of justice, but as an existential threat to its own scheme of domination.

This systematic suspension of legality within national borders has provided fertile ground for an even more sinister development. In fact, the decade of Syrian civil war has produced an even more parasitic mutation: in exchange for the military support guaranteed for the survival of the Assad regime, Hezbollah has obtained the green light to transform Syrian territory and the Bekaa Valley into an immense synthetic drug laboratory. This is how the Captagon Economy was born: a dastardly pact aimed at compensating for Iran’s growing financial shortcomings through global drug trafficking.

This drift reached its tragic climax in October 2023, when Hezbollah unilaterally decided to drag Lebanon into a personal war against Israel. Without any mandate and in total defiance of the Lebanese institutions and people, the Party of God turned the nation into an expendable theatre for imperial logics heterodirected by Tehran. However, the killing of Hassan Nasrallah in September 2024 and the subsequent collapse of the militia’s myth of invincibility marked the end of this bellicose and warmongering gamble.

Today, this scenario of impunity falters under the weight of a historical convergence unprecedented since 1990: the collapse of external parasitic rents and the emergence of a new, vibrant civic consciousness. In this context, the election deadline should not be read as an ordinary consultation, but as the founding act of a possible new Lebanese constitutional pact. It is a head-on challenge to an elite and a paramilitary apparatus that has thrived on the disintegration of the state and the opportunistic privatisation of force.

Europe, Mediterranean security and the return to the spirit of Taif

Dismantling this militarised system is no longer just a Lebanese necessity, but a security imperative for the whole of Europe. The Mediterranean cannot tolerate a permanent destabilisation platform on its doorstep, where statelessness translates into trafficking, judicial impunity and warlike adventurism. However, this drift cannot be reversed by repressive action alone, but by draining the political swamp that feeds it: threats to judges, control of the gates and parallel economies are but the different faces of a single occupation of institutions. In this sense, the vote in May is no longer a choice of sides, but the unrepeatable opportunity to regain possession of legality and unhinge from within the ganglia of the hijacked state, definitively ending the era of impunity guaranteed by weapons.

In this framework, the recovery of sovereignty cannot be separated from a return to the original spirit of the Taif Accords. That pact, which ended the civil war in 1989, contained within it the germ of a modern and civilised Lebanon, based on the disarmament of all militias and the reaffirmation of state authority. However, for more than three decades, that promise has been betrayed by the privatisation of force by Hezbollah. This is where the European Union must play a pioneering diplomatic role, working closely with the Gulf countries to force the full implementation of the agreements.

To unhinge this system, Europe must stop acting as a mere humanitarian donor and assume the role of political actor and guarantor of legality. The first lever of this change must be the rigorous application of targeted sanctions along the lines of the Magnitsky model, directed not only at Hezbollah’s leadership but at the entire network of political complicity that has guaranteed impunity to the lords of the captagon and the architects of judicial obstructionism. At the same time, the reconstruction of the country must go through a radical reform of the banking system under European supervision: international financial support must be conditional on strict transparency of accounts and an asset recovery process that will bring back to Lebanon the capital illegally embezzled by the elites during the 2019 collapse.

But sovereignty is also defended at border crossings. The EU must champion a technical assistance mission for the governance of ports and land borders. This is not a matter of commissioning the state, but of equipping the legal Lebanese institutions with the necessary technology and training to remove the management of logistical flows from the arbitrariness and interests of Iran and Hezbollah.

But the reappropriation of sovereignty cannot stop at ports; it must address the historical anomaly of national borders that have remained deliberately liquid for decades. Lebanon suffers from a chronic lack of demarcation that has only served its perpetrators. On the one hand, the Assad regime has never wanted to draw a clear line with Beirut, maintaining a territorial ambiguity designed to justify a form of permanent political and military colonisation. On the other, this indeterminacy has been the lifeblood of Hezbollah, to which a porous border with Syria guaranteed the logistical continuity of the land bridge with Iran.

Today, taking advantage of the new scenario in Syria after the fall of Assad, the European Union and the international community must support the Lebanese government in immediately starting the technical work of demarcating the eastern and northern borders. Establishing where Lebanon ends and Syria begins is the first act of real independence.

The 10 May vote and the challenge to seized sovereignty

In this scenario, the priority must not be to wait for an external military resolution, a historically unsuccessful muscular strategy, but to create real conditions for the exercise of democracy. The real challenge to Hezbollah’s monopoly is through the force of popular vote, but this requires a profound revision of the international community’s role on the ground. For decades, the UNIFIL mission has paradoxically ended up acting as a shield to the militias’ illegal presence south of the Litani river, limiting itself to passive observation of the systematic hollowing out of state sovereignty. With its mandate expiring in December 2026, inaction by the UN Security Council can no longer be an option: it is imperative to act in advance to overcome a peacekeeping model that is now anachronistic.

The crucial challenge of 10 May requires a radical transformation of the mission, which must be complemented by a Euro-Arab Electoral Sovereignty Task Force, focused exclusively on high-impact election monitoring and technical protection of the democratic process. This deployment must guarantee a technical and deterrent garrison of the most sensitive polling stations, neutralising historical territorial intimidation tactics and ensuring strict supervision of counting centres and digital infrastructure. Only through this targeted support for legality can the Lebanese citizen’s pencil finally weigh more than the gun.

If the UN civilian component will ensure transparency, the Lebanese army, under the leadership of Joseph Aoun’s presidency, will have to act as the operational arm for the physical security of the polling stations. Only this synergy can allow the diaspora and resident citizens, free from the blackmail of sectarian subsidies and physical threats, to oust Hezbollah from power through the legitimacy of the vote. On 10 May, Lebanon has the opportunity to prove that stability is not achieved through the parasitism of militias, but by retaking institutions.

This institutional transition, protected by the Army and monitored by the UN, would find its natural completion in the realignment of Lebanon with the Arab area of stability. The financial and political support of the Gulf States, coordinated by European direction, is the only engine capable of replacing Iranian terror rents with productive and transparent investments.