In early May 2022, from Sydney to Los Angeles, Lebanese emigrants and expatriates lined up outside embassies, consulates, and polling centers to cast ballots in a parliamentary election in which, for the first time, their votes made a difference. Turnout far exceeded that of 2018; the ballots of Lebanese abroad helped deliver at least seven seats, five of them to candidates outside the political establishment. Yet when they line up again for elections next year, these same people will face a question both simple and absurd: will their votes still count in their home districts toward all current 128 parliamentary seats, or will they be confined to a separate diaspora bloc of just six seats?
Indeed, as the 2026 elections approach, the question of diaspora voting rights has reemerged as a flashpoint in Lebanon’s fractured political scene. Article 112 of the 2017 electoral law stipulates that the diaspora should elect six parliamentarians—one for Lebanese communities in each of the world’s inhabited continents—and have no say in electing the 128 parliamentarians representing districts in Lebanon. However, in the run-up to elections in 2018 and 2022, Article 112 was suspended by amendment, meaning that diaspora Lebanese voted for candidates vying for seats in their home districts back in Lebanon. The difference this time is that Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri has blocked the proposed amendment to yet again suspend Article 112. As such, once someone registers to vote abroad, they forfeit the right to vote in their home district. Those living abroad but who do not register there would have to travel to Lebanon just to vote.
Critics note that the 2017 electoral law remains vague. For example, it is still not exactly clear how the six diaspora seats would be allocated, or how they would figure within the broader parliamentary system. Earlier this year, about 50 demonstrators gathered outside the Beirut Municipality building, chanting, “128, not six.” Civil society groups have echoed that demand, insisting that emigrants should vote in their home constituencies rather than in a new diaspora district. Religious authorities have entered the debate as well. Maronite Patriarch Bishara al-Rai condemned the six-seat plan as “a form of exclusion,” arguing that it violates the constitutional principle of equality by denying emigrants the right to vote for candidates from their districts.
Political parties that stand to gain from a situation in which Lebanese abroad have a say in Lebanon’s political landscape are also concerned. If emigrants are restricted to electing only six diaspora parliamentarians, tens of thousands of potentially influential votes would play no role in who represents the various districts in Lebanon. These raw political calculations are important. The constituent parties of Lebanon’s former ruling parliamentary bloc—Hezbollah, Amal, and the Free Patriotic Movement (FPM)—have not forgotten the diaspora’s impact in 2022, which altered the calculus of Lebanese politics. Whereas in 2018, only about 47,000 citizens abroad voted, by 2022, that figure had surged to roughly 140,000, which was around 7 percent of total voters.
The change was not merely numerical; voting patterns diverged sharply from those inside Lebanon. While in-country voters gave only about 11 percent of their ballots to anti-establishment candidates, the diaspora’s share reached 34 percent. Moreover, support for the Lebanese Forces among emigrants doubled, and backing for Hezbollah, Amal, and the FPM collapsed. The parliamentary debate on voting today maps almost perfectly on those results: parties that benefited from diaspora votes seek to preserve them; those who lost want to curtail them.
Much of this shift reflects who the newer emigrants are. Many left the country after the 2019 financial collapse or the 2020 Beirut port explosion. Their departure was not voluntary, but rather a form of exile born of crisis and disillusionment. In voting, they carried that frustration home. However, that these voting trends will continue in 2026 is admittedly far from guaranteed. If the 2025 municipal elections are any indicator, supporters of the thawra, or revolution, camp, energized in 2022, seem to be fragmenting due to disaffection with the performance of the candidates they elected. Yet the instinct of the former ruling bloc is consistent: contain what cannot be managed. The move to shrink the diaspora vote is an attempt to domesticate a constituency that refuses to play by the rules of mediation and patronage.
As it happens, the tension between Lebanon and its diaspora is neither new nor accidental. For decades, successive governments courted emigrants and expatriates as economic lifelines and symbols of national pride, but rarely as full political participants. The diaspora was invoked as a resource, its bodies, savings, and nostalgia deployed in the service of a state that rarely reciprocated. Its voice was never integrated into Lebanon’s ever-evolving domestic political configuration.
In 2025, the government launched a campaign to, among other things, lure Lebanese emigrants back for the summer, framing their return as both a patriotic reconnection and an economic boost. The reality, however, was bleak. Though hundreds of thousands of citizens did fly in from abroad, bringing stories, spending power, and the illusion of reconnection, it was not enough. Against a backdrop of Israeli strikes on Lebanon (despite a ceasefire with Hezbollah) and regional war, tourism sector professionals were left disappointed when a summer that had looked promising ultimately fell short.
And this was hardly the first time the Lebanese state substituted pageantry for substance. In 1955, President Camille Chamoun inaugurated the “Summer of Emigrants,” a campaign of parades and patriotic festivals meant to entice emigrants and expatriates to come home. The state invested in spectacle, not infrastructure, throwing the visiting Lebanese week-long parties but failing to channel their engagement into any lasting national project.
At its core, the diaspora voting debate is about identity. Despite paying lip service to the mythology of Lebanon as a diaspora nation, citizenship in the logic of the state remains rooted in presence: in neighborhoods, sectarian networks, and clientelist chains. The citizen, by this measure, is someone here. Diaspora voters violate that premise. Their absence universalizes the claim to belonging to Lebanon. Their ballots speak from afar, insisting that citizenship is not geography but origin, memory, and accountability.
This unsettles Lebanon’s current political imagination. If citizens live abroad, vote abroad, and still shape outcomes, then authority, once thought anchored to territory, must adapt. Patronage and brokerage begin to falter.
The difference between six and 128 is not merely one of arithmetic. It signals a contest over whether those who left the country still count as citizens with political agency or merely as a sentimental and financial reservoir. The choice between six and 128 is, in effect, a choice over who gets to imagine the republic, and who is imagined out of it. Parliament may yet force the six-seat compromise, corralling diaspora representation into a tidy, symbolic compartment. But whether parliament succeeds or not, the diaspora has already made clear that it is a force Lebanon must reckon with if the country truly wishes to change.
