Law amendments stalls: Lebanon's 2026 elections hang in the balance—Latest details

Report by Maroun Nassif, English adaptation by Yasmine Jaroudi  

The fate of Lebanon's 2026 parliamentary elections remains uncertain as the country's political institutions trade responsibility over key electoral provisions.

Parliament has shifted the issue to the government, urging it to issue implementing decrees that would allow enforcement of the current election law, particularly the clauses allocating six seats to non-resident Lebanese. 

In turn, the government has pushed the matter back to Parliament, arguing that both the overseas voting mechanism and the introduction of a magnetic voting card are not feasible.

Under the existing law, if elections are to be held on schedule while keeping the six expatriate seats, the government must, by a two-thirds majority, issue decrees detailing how those seats would be distributed across continents, as stipulated in Article 124 of the electoral law. 

However, such approval is unlikely, as a majority in Prime Minister Nawaf Salam's cabinet opposes maintaining the six seats and insists that expatriates vote for all 128 members of Parliament instead.

Alternatively, Parliament could amend the law to cancel the six-seat allocation and allow expatriates to vote for all 128 seats, as was done in the 2018 and 2022 elections. This would require a quorum of 65 MPs and a simple majority of 33 votes to suspend or amend Articles 112 and 122 of the law, which raises the number of deputies to 134 to accommodate the expatriate seats.

Yet this path is also stalled. Speaker Nabih Berri has so far refused to call a parliamentary session to debate amendments to the electoral law, a stance supported by Hezbollah. 

Both argue that allowing expatriates to vote for all 128 seats would be unfair, citing restrictions faced by candidates affiliated with groups designated as terrorist organizations, who are barred from campaigning in the United States, several European countries, and Gulf states, while their rivals enjoy unrestricted international mobility.