Analyze

Nearly a year after assuming the Apostolic See at the Vatican, Pope Leo XIV met with American Secretary of State Marco Rubio in the first meeting between him and a senior official of President Donald Trump's administration, amid an atmosphere of mounting tensions fuelled by mutual declarations on the war against Iran and immigration policies. The first American pope in the history of the Catholic Church demonstrated firm and classical positions of the Church in promoting the values of peace and dialogue, and had to face the criticism of President Trump, who claimed that he "exposed the Church, Catholics and peoples to danger", holding that the Pope's positions suggested he "saw no objection to Iran acquiring nuclear weapons". Leo hastened to deny these accusations, reaffirming the Church's rejection of nuclear weapons and dismissing Trump's statements as "inaccurate". Throughout his journey across the African continent, Leo displayed great wisdom and measured caution, clearly unwilling to engage in a polyphonic duel with the American president. He exercised his freedom of speech with the goodwill of righteous men, addressing all matters generally but particularly those in which certainty is lacking and where doubt remains as to America's resort to power politics, thereby reminding the world of the Catholic Church's conviction in the supremacy of spiritual authority over temporal power. Two themes ran through all the stops of his visit, from Turkey to Lebanon, through Algeria and on to the Mediterranean port of Marseille: peace, and the rejection of a war that has returned to hammer at the eastern and southern gates, borne along by an unbridled Trumpian fortune that destroys, in the manner of Machiavelli in his day, the familiar landmarks of the world. The Church therefore holds itself apart from another bias to which commentators are prone, that of conducting itself according to the morality of the political man, and more decisively still, from proclaiming that the true enemy of the classical intellectual and theological heritage of the Church is silence, or the declaration of neutrality on the values of pluralism, democracy, the common good and its credible representation, far more than relativism in political positions or in consciousness. The Pope thus cuts through with his rejection of the very idea of war, invoking the beatitude of the peacemakers, and in his condemnation of any attempt to isolate the pluralist dynamic of Europe, animated by its demographic vitality, from the rest of the planet, as well as in his denunciation of the extractive and unjust methods practised at the expense of peoples in their entirety. He addresses them, at best, individually at times, on the question of peace, for every human being carries within him a part of virtue and wisdom, and when they gather together, they form a single man with multiple feet, multiple hands, and multiple senses, in the manner of Aristotle measuring this "moral competence of the people". In Algeria, in the presence of President Abdelmadjid Tebboune, the Pope urged "those who hold power in this country to strengthen a vibrant, dynamic and free civil society", five years after the suppression of the Hirak movement for democracy. "Do not be afraid of opposition. Do not stifle the visions of youth", he was to repeat later in Angola. In Cameroon, before General Paul Biya, who has held power for more than four decades, he also expressed his consternation at a world "invaded by force, held in the grip of a handful of tyrants and corruption". He further denounced "the hidden face of the environmental and social destruction wrought by the feverish race for raw materials and rare earths", which fuels wars and interference across the African continent. He also warned against "the perverted use of artificial intelligence to fuel polarisation, conflicts, fears and violence bearing down on the belonging and social, political or community identity of minorities, unable to bear the weight of closed intellectual systems". In Lebanon, the Pope bore witness to a profound fatigue and a sense of "no way out" in the face of what appeared to be the imminent resumption of war. He did not conceal his anger at the Israeli war, nor his bitterness at Hezbollah's decision to plunge into it, affirming to his clergy and to the Christian community in particular that their rootedness in the East represented a genuine mission in the very logic of religious and political existence. He knew that the suffering of the population had been relegated to second place in favour of major geopolitical calculations. He measured the depth of the anxiety felt by the Lebanese people, and by Christians in particular, when certain events in Syria and the region took on an almost catastrophic dimension. For the risk of communal tensions and fractures extended beyond the cleavages between different religious communities: it ran through each one of them. These messages inscribe Leo XIV in continuity with Pope Francis, with the determination not to let them be extinguished by the turbulence of the world. They make themselves heard and resonate in his raising of his voice and in the manner in which he addresses those who hold political power, without deference or complacency, and without yielding to Trump's repeated provocations, Trump who did not accept being called to account by the successor of Saint Peter over his wars in the Middle East, and attempted to defuse matters with mockery of "the Pope's weakness", going so far as to post on his social network Truth Social an image bearing a Christic iconography in which he appears as a thaumaturge, clad in the white robe and red mantle of the Redeemer. The Pope thus found himself in the position of his predecessor John Paul II, who in 1978 had launched his celebrated phrase "Be not afraid" during his inauguration Mass, a message of hope carried by the former Bishop of Krakow, in a Poland that was to know the earthquakes leading to the dismemberment of the Soviet Union. Forty-eight years on, that call finds its echo in the one raised by the American churchman, who declares that he feels no "fear" before the American president nor before his Vice-President J. D. Vance, who saw fit to give Leo XIV a lesson in theology, in an external political posture devoid of credibility, marked by illogic and incoherence in the face of the acceleration of history and the overturning of the world under the weight of multiple and entangled crises since "the Trumpian ascent". These positions are not isolated, as Europeans discover their own isolation according to Hubert Védrine and will have to embark upon a "conceptual revolution" by "abandoning the pretence of being the centre of the world", within a near-chaotic system taking shape according to the great French anthropologist Maurice Godelier, who calls for a "moral rearmament" in order to "better respond to those who persist in thinking about surpassing the West or fighting it". For four cycles of Western dominance over the world's destiny since the sixteenth century have come to an end: the reassertion of the United States on capitalism and democracy since 1917, the world order of 1945, and finally globalisation, which began in 1979 and closed in 2022 with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. A new age of empires is taking shape today in an unstable and heterogeneous geopolitical world, where violence frees itself from the institutions and rules that sought to contain it, and where peace becomes impossible whilst war is omnipresent. Democracies are in retreat and face an existential threat under the effect of American liberalism's drift towards injustice and inequality and its convergence with the principles of authoritarian regimes, leaving Europe encircled between the vital threat posed by Russia, China's economic dominance, the pressure of a Turkey mobilising Islam to rebuild the Ottoman Empire, and the hostility of the South nurtured by the colonial past. The Church does not find itself disarmed or weakened for all that. It has not succumbed to the illusions of the end of history, nor to the sway of large markets, nor to the politics of force that remains the monopoly of the great powers in Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the genocide perpetrated in Gaza, the unilateral initiatives of the United States aimed at overthrowing regimes in Venezuela and now in Iran, all operations undertaken without seeking the slightest semblance of international approval, as with the weaponisation of trade, technology and even migration flows, increasingly used as levers of coercion against competitors or in service of their own geopolitical interests. A portion of the world chooses silence and ambiguity rather than defending international law, seeking to avoid any confrontation, and thus slides towards appeasement. This is an error, by the standards of the Catholic Church

When I used to travel to Canada, I was always provoked by Israeli propaganda that claimed falafel, tabbouleh and hummus as part of traditional Jewish-Israeli heritage. It was an appropriation of culinary traditions that have belonged to the Levant for centuries, and not merely the theft of a patrimony: it was the confiscation of an identity and a memory. No people in history has invested in memory as the Jews did in the aftermath of the Holocaust. They built one of the most powerful systems of memorial preservation the world has ever seen, turning memory into a total apparatus: material, pedagogical and legal, designed to be indelible. They catalogued personal belongings in museums, gathering thousands of objects that had belonged to the victims: shoes, bags bearing the names of their owners, eyeglasses, hair shorn from prisoners, clothing and small personal items (combs, watches, rings); all in order to attest that the victims were real individuals, and not merely numbers. They turned to archives and documents, railway deportation records, nominal lists, official Nazi decrees, letters and diaries, to transform memory into a legal and historical proof that could not be denied. They preserved the sites of the crime, erected memorials, recorded survivors' testimonies in sound and image, then integrated all of this into school curricula, producing films and works of literature. They turned memory into a sensory and cultural experience, and protected it through the law rather than through sentiment alone. Can someone who knows all of this about the power and importance of memory genuinely claim not to know what destroying it means for others? Is it not precisely because they know what destruction means that they "destroy" everything? If memory is what gives a human being their name, their history and their right to say "I was here," then to erase it is the shortest path to reducing that person to a number, by the very people who once fought to turn victims from numbers back into names. The destruction of villages and towns in southern Lebanon thus goes well beyond a military operation, and cannot be reduced to the language of statistics: the number of buildings razed, the cost of losses. What is happening runs far deeper. We are confronted with an organised attempt to strike at something more precious than stone: memory. When the great mosque, the heritage houses and even the cemeteries are levelled, the purpose goes beyond the erasure of landmarks: it is the witness itself that is to be eliminated. This is not random destruction. It is a systematic assault against life as such: homes, schools, mosques, markets, and everything that testifies that human beings once lived here, loved, learned, built meaning for their existence, and were also buried here. This is an openly declared act of uprooting: uprooting people from their places, and uprooting places from their memory. It is the erasure of a collective biography: that of generations who lived and learned, of students' voices, of teachers who carried a vocation, of a local history that took shape in silence over decades and centuries. And when a mosque or a heritage house is destroyed, the loss cannot be measured in concrete, but in the history, the meaning and the sense of belonging that those walls contained. Contrary to what is often assumed, memory is not an abstract idea. It is bound to place: to stone, to sanctuary and tomb, to the staircase and the neighbourhood, to names that repeat themselves from generation to generation. To destroy a place is, in its very essence, to destroy memory. History teaches us that peoples who experience an unstable relationship with the land, as is the case for Israelis in occupied Palestine, tend to reshape place in accordance with their own narrative. Not only through construction, but above all through erasure. For the elimination of the other's traces is never accidental: it is a bid for control of the narrative. Who was here? And who has the right to say "this land is mine"? We are witnessing a pattern of violence that surpasses war to reach something deeper: an assault against the human being, against their memory, against the values that make life in common possible. A moral collapse that redefines the relationship with the other on the sole basis of force and violence. Attacks on civilian sites constitute a manifest violation of the principles of international humanitarian law. The destruction of cultural and religious property can only be characterised as grave violations, rising to the level of war crimes under internationally recognised standards. There are, moreover, the acts of looting reported by Israeli media themselves: soldiers entering houses and leaving with personal belongings, jewellery, and even family photographs. Such acts cannot be dismissed as mere details. What depth of moral degradation must be reached for a family photograph, a bedcover or a private keepsake to become a spoil of war? What is at issue here is not individual misconduct, but behaviour that reveals a mentality: treating a place as an emptiness, and its inhabitants as though they had never existed. International law names this act "pillage" (pillage), expressly prohibited and constitutive of a war crime under the rules of international humanitarian law and the Geneva Conventions, because it touches not only on property, but on the dignity of civilians and their fundamental rights. A family photograph is not a stolen object: it is a document of identity. Its theft goes beyond the material to become a violation of private life, and thus intersects with the violation of the right to human dignity. The message, here, is unambiguous: we do not want only your land, we want to erase your traces upon it. The most dangerous blow of all, however, concerns the disappearance of property boundaries, the erasure of landmarks and the destruction of cadastral records and land registries. The damage then becomes a long-term threat to rights, no less grave than the bombardment itself. Destruction becomes a future legal problem: who owns what? Where does property begin and where does it end? It is a systematic undermining and erasure of civil rights and private property, as though the war waged by the Israelis were not content with immediate destruction alone, but extended to sow lasting disputes within the society itself. Once the destruction of memory asserts itself as a recurring pattern: targeting of civilian infrastructure, mass destruction with no discernible military necessity, systematic pillage, we are no longer speaking of mere excesses, but of acts that fall within the framework of crimes against humanity. And the question, at this stage, is no longer only technical or legal: it is moral. For the values supposed to govern the conduct of war, even in its most extreme circumstances, collapse the moment the civilian, their memory and their property become a legitimate target. Yet these attempts run up against a fundamental truth: memory does not erase itself easily. Stone can be broken, but it is difficult to uproot meaning. Memory is admittedly like glass, its fractures resist repair, but neither does it disappear entirely. It endures in people, in language, in longing, and in the act of rebuilding itself. The question lies not only in what is destroyed, but in how we respond. Repeating ready-made formulas like "we will rebuild better than before" is not enough; it may even be a form of flight. True reconstruction begins with the acknowledgement of loss: there is a real fracture, there are things that cannot be entirely repaired, there is something irreplaceable that has been lost. What the South needs today, therefore, is not only reconstruction, but the protection of its memory: documenting what has been destroyed and recording the violations, preserving names and evidence, redrawing maps and consolidating rights through legal channels, safeguarding narratives and pursuing those responsible within international frameworks. For the battle, in the final account, is not only over the land, but over the meaning of that land. And whoever succeeds in protecting their memory succeeds in enduring.

Traditional analyses of Lebanon consistently utilize the "sectarian paradigm," viewing the state as a delicate equilibrium of religious factions. However, this lens fails to account for the current systemic disintegration that transcends communal boundaries. By applying Émile Durkheim’s paradigm of Anomie, this document argues that the Lebanese crisis is characterized not by sectarian friction, but by a profound state of "normlessness" and the deregulation of social life. In this view, sectarianism is not the primary cause of collapse, but a residual survival mechanism appearing in the vacuum left by a shattered social contract. I. Defining the Lens: The Durkheimian Anomie In “The Division of Labour in Society” (1893) and “Suicide” (1897), Émile Durkheim defined Anomie as a condition of social deregulation where the collective consciousness no longer provides the moral framework necessary to limit individual desires and expectations. Anomie arises during periods of rapid, catastrophic change—economic or social—where the "rules of the game" vanish. In an anomic society, the traditional institutions that once mediated between the individual and the world (the state, the law, the economy) lose their authority, leaving individuals in a state of "deracination" (uprootedness) and chronic frustration. II. Lebanon’s General Anomie: Beyond the Sectarian Veil While the sectarian paradigm suggests that Lebanese citizens are primarily driven by loyalty to their religious "In-Group," the data suggests a deeper, cross-communal reality: the total collapse of the Moral Authority of the state. 1. The Economic Deregulation: The collapse of the banking sector and the evaporation of the middle class is not a sectarian event; it is an anomic one. When a population’s life savings disappear and the currency loses 98% of its value, the "work-reward" social contract is annulled. Whether in Christian Ashrafieh or Shia “Dahiyeh”, the realization that "meritocracy is a lie" leads to a shared state of normlessness. 2. The Institutional Void: Durkheim argued that society requires "intermediate bodies" to function. In Lebanon, every intermediate body—from the judiciary to the educational system—is paralyzed. This has created a "Collective Anomie" where the population no longer knows which laws to follow, which currency to use, or what the future "normal" looks like. 3. The Youth Bulge as an Anomic Force: The Lebanese "Youth Bulge" is the demographic face of anomie. For the 15–24 age bracket across all sects, the traditional "pathways to adulthood" (employment, marriage, home-ownership) are blocked. This results in what Durkheim termed "the malady of the infinite"—desires that have no possibility of being satisfied by the existing structure, leading to either total apathy (brain drain) or radicalization (the search for a new, often violent, order). III. Why Anomie Outperforms the Sectarian Paradigm The sectarian paradigm is a static lens; it assumes that the problem is simply "too many identities." The anomie paradigm is a dynamic lens; it recognizes that the problem is the absence of a shared reality. Symptom vs. Cause : Sectarianism in 2026 Lebanon is a “symptom” of anomie. People do not retreat into sectarian bunkers because they are inherently intolerant; they retreat because the sect is the only remaining "intermediate body" that offers protection in a normless void. By focusing on sectarianism, analysts target the symptom while ignoring the cause: the total deregulation of Lebanese life. The Universality of Crisis : The sectarian lens suggests the crisis affects groups differently. The anomie lens proves the crisis is universal. The Christian engineer in Jbeil and the Sunni laborer in Tripoli are both suffering from the same breakdown of social regulation. Both have lost faith in the state’s ability to provide a predictable environment. The Predictive Powe r : Anomie explains why "political reforms" (like a new President or Cabinet) fail to stabilize the country. If the social fabric is anomic, a new political figurehead is irrelevant because the "norms" they are supposed to uphold no longer exist in the hearts of the citizens. IV. Conclusion: The Roadmap to Regulation To solve the Lebanese crisis, one must seek to re-regulate society rather than "balance" its sects. This requires moving beyond flights of sectarian desperation and focusing on the foundations of a new social contract. Stabilization will only occur when a new moral and economic order—one based on the realistic figures of 2026—can replace the vacuum of anomie. Until then, Lebanon remains a society "unhinged" from its own limitations, where the lack of common ground is not a choice of identity, but a consequence of institutional death.

The constitutional law enacted on 21 September 1990 enriched the preamble of the Lebanese Constitution with fundamental provisions stipulating that Lebanon is a free and independent homeland, the definitive homeland of all its sons, united within its internationally recognised borders in its land, its people and its institutions, and that its identity and belonging are Arab. Paragraph (c) further provides that Lebanon is a democratic parliamentary republic. It is from this precise point that one must illuminate the effectiveness of the parliamentary regime established after the Taif Agreement, a regime that has nonetheless demonstrated its inability to build the State and its institutions, and whose faithfulness to the people that elected it on several occasions is legitimately open to question. This domain is acquiring growing importance and is now imposing itself as a vital, intensive and long-term mission, in the wake of a succession of tragic developments made up of wars and political crises confirmed on many occasions. The concept of parliamentarism has never been deemed incompatible with diplomacy, which is by nature a sovereign function devoted to addressing political, economic and social crises without the Lebanese situation improving in the process. The role of parliamentarians is today called into question in the face of the existential crisis that Lebanon is traversing under the effects of what constitutes the fourth or fifth consecutive Israeli war since 1969, a war that invalidates the credibility of the legislative power as a factor of internal and external stability, owing to the non-observance of universally recognised constitutional principles. The Lebanese political class has for decades been entrenching itself behind the façade of a democratic climate that serves as its shelter for cultivating the confessional sharing of power, clientelism and sectarianism, counter to any other Arab or Western political society that is mindful of democratic principles and their anchoring in stable laws founded on the primacy of law and the State, as well as on the requirement of civic equality, universality and justice. The examination of parliamentary practices and behaviours since the nineteen-nineties reveals no respect whatsoever for the commonly accepted norms governing legislative production, already severely limited from one year to the next, in a context marked by the flagrant absence of implementing decrees, and where the majority of texts adopted satisfy neither the requirements of human rights nor those of the rule of law. Democratic governance can indeed only be conceived on condition that the power in question conforms to the internal and international constitutional legitimacy that frames it. Respect for internal legality is defined by a Constitution that forms the social contract freely accepted by the people in the entirety of its principles, its rules and its mechanisms, a contract which, when honoured, confers on the State solid democratic credibility and marks it with the seal of stability and prosperity. None of this has come to pass in this perpetually suspended Lebanon, owing to the inherent vices of majority tyranny, the slowness of legislative production and the absence of any parliamentary scrutiny of the executive, which generally functions on a consensual and mutually accommodating basis with it, so that solutions emerge only in the form of partisan compromises or settlements of a militia-like and totalitarian character. More serious still, citizens are most of the time unaware of what is actually being plotted. The work of other deputies is often distinguished by excessive opacity, sometimes even prohibitive, or by political indigence in the examination of dossiers, according to certain minority but competent opinions within the current Parliament presided over by Nabih Berri and which remains under extension, without parliamentary initiatives being coordinated through reinforced information-sharing and mutual consultations, nor through technical expertise in drafting bills of a technical character, these experts working within the structures of the executive power, so that a number of projects submitted to the institution originate from successive governments far more than they emanate from the legislative assemblies themselves. On the legislative level, the influence of Lebanese parliamentarians remains extremely limited in the domain of domestic policy. The majority functions essentially as a rubber-stamp chamber, endorsing bills that have been subject to no prior negotiation before their signing by governments and that deputies cannot amend. Executive declarations on these matters provoke a debate, then sometimes a non-binding vote, which is itself an exercise in pure rhetorical form and modest utility, rarely filling the chambers of Parliament with any agitation whatsoever, in an institution divided into zones of influence where proposals are concerned, which are not examined with rigour and are subjected to formal votes devoid of any symbolic value likely to interest civil society. These votes do not bind the government in its policies, and the question of institutional performance and of the capacity of institutions to fulfil their role of development and reform remains entirely open. The prerogatives belonging in law to Parliament also come up against other insurmountable challenges in a country governed by confessional usages, which contradict the democratic foundations that the Lebanese people is supposed to accept, decide upon and respond to according to the logic of direct and credible popular representation. Thus the President of Parliament allows himself, in certain cases, to overstep the attributions of the legislative power, while the rules of procedure reserve for him a relatively extensive framework at the expense of the parliamentarians themselves, and while the role of parliamentary blocs remains limited as an operational reference. Elected assemblies frequently find themselves compelled to respond to the demands of pressure groups or to delegate authority to the executive, or bilaterally to the president of the assembly who acts as he sees fit, without any genuine relationship being formed between parliamentarians as representatives of the whole of the Lebanese people. The political class has thus succeeded in creating zones of influence to the detriment of the deputies' own capacity to make themselves heard, including at the time of adopting a general budget or financial reform projects that have been stalled for years, and the legislative power thereby transgresses the very principles that the Constitution specifically requires it to guarantee. As for the executive's reactions to these parliamentary initiatives, they oscillate between indifference and criticism emanating from official sources, not as added value but as a simple nuisance within a relationship of mutual facilitation intended to manage crises over the long term, which may even constitute a real obstacle in bilateral relations between the two powers. The Lebanese parliamentary regime is on the brink of the abyss. Repeated extensions give the impression of an outdated democracy, and this is precisely what one is entitled to anticipate for the coming two years in the lifespan of the current assembly, which is moreover what the politicians in power wish for in rejecting any reasonable change that would allow more flexibility for the benefit of the Lebanese. The political seat in Lebanon is perceived as a prized catch opening onto endless and hereditarily transmitted privileges, as well as onto a form of class hierarchy and arrogance in this regard, in a system where everything likewise ends up being traded in for ever more coveted ministerial posts, distributed among rival political groups competing for the portfolios with the highest budgets. This deficit in democratic maturity renders the situation all the more disheartening, as few points are gained at the electoral level, nor at the level of equality among all Lebanese before the law and of the equal and non-discriminatory right of each to benefit from its protection, whether in matters of political or other opinion, of the general interest or of the common good, as if the law were required to prohibit all propaganda in favour of war and any call to national, racial or religious hatred constituting an incitement to discrimination, to internal hostility or to violence. It is well established that the primary guarantee of democratic governance resides in the effectiveness of the legislative power itself, because it is composed of elected assemblies as stipulated by Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, expressing the will of the people, source of sovereignty, in matters of decisions of war and peace. The legislative power likewise guarantees, and must guarantee as any constitution worthy of the name, the independence of the judiciary and the oversight of the executive under pain of the appropriate legal remedies, in addition to its own independence, in the care that international law takes to protect freedom of expression without hesitation, while ensuring that the exercise of this freedom is inscribed within respect for public order, the freedom of others and the promotion of understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, to the exclusion of all racism and religious fanaticism. The legislative power constitutes the fundamental regulator of State relations in both the internal and international order. This form of parliamentarism, absent from Lebanon, does not encompass the work of parliamentary assemblies that directly represent the people, express its aspirations and conditions of existence, engage with international legality by defining the necessity of concluding normative international treaties and committing to the protection of human rights of both the individual and the people, thereby advancing forthcoming dossiers with procedures that conform to the texts in force in both orders of internal and international legitimacy, effective and democratic, to which elected representatives can usefully contribute. There is something fundamentally sound in the rules of credible conformity. It is the call of the new Lebanese Republic.

Mali has been traversing a multidimensional crisis since 2012, one whose roots plunge into the Libyan collapse, which flooded the Sahel with weapons and fighters, durably transforming the entire region’s security balance. That year, Tuareg rebels had proclaimed the independence of the country’s north before being rapidly supplanted by their Islamist allies linked to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. France then intervened militarily in 2013 to contain the jihadist advance, without ever managing to eradicate it. The following decade was, for Mali, one of continuous deterioration. The 2015 Algiers peace accords between Bamako and the northern armed movements were never fully implemented. Terrorism spread into the centre and south of the country, and intercommunal violence intensified. In 2020 and again in 2021, two successive coups brought Colonel Assimi Goïta to power, whose military junta named itself the “Transition” — pending a return to constitutional order — yet this supposedly provisional arrangement has now persisted for five years without any credible electoral horizon in sight. The Shadow of Putin over Africa The junta immediately set about breaking with its former partners. France was asked to withdraw its forces. The United Nations saw its peacekeeping mission curtailed then expelled. In their place came Wagner, the Russian private militia since rebranded as the “Africa Corps,” deployed on Malian soil with several thousand men. Mali then joined Burkina Faso and Niger — both also governed by coup-born juntas — to form the Alliance of Sahel States (AES), which broke with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the fifteen-member regional organisation, and turned to Moscow for its security backing. Russia’s presence in Mali is certainly not an exercise in security philanthropy. It rests on a model already proven in the Central African Republic, Sudan and Libya: trading military protection for access to natural resources. In this specific case, Malian gold — the Africa Corps having been documented at the country’s main artisanal mining sites. Beyond that, Moscow pursues broader objectives: validating the narrative of a neocolonial West, securing proxy votes at the United Nations, monitoring French and American military and diplomatic movements in the Sahel, and opening new markets for its weapons. Morocco and Algeria The Malian conflict, at first reading, pits a weakened military government and its Russian allies against two types of armed adversaries: Al-Qaeda-affiliated jihadist groups, of which the Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM, known by its French acronym GSIM) is the principal operational structure across the Sahel, and the separatist movements of the North, grouped within the Azawad Liberation Front (FLA, a reconfigured heir to the 2012 Tuareg separatist movements). But this reading of the de facto forces is insufficient without the regional geopolitical dimension, where two competing influence projects are in reality at play: that of Algeria, which has long weighed on the Malian file through its mediation and networks, and that of Morocco, which has patiently built an African foothold grounded in economic, religious and security cooperation. Mali’s diplomatic about-face of 10 April 2026 — the withdrawal of recognition from the Sahrawi Republic backed by Algiers — abruptly brought this rivalry into the open. The 25 April Offensive It was in this context that the 25 April 2026 offensive unfolded, as the JNIM and the FLA launched a series of coordinated attacks on Bamako, Kati, Mopti, Sévaré, Gao, Bourem and Kidal — covering the entire north-south axis of the country, from the Saharan desert to the capital. A systemic offensive whose reach extends far beyond the usual front lines into the fields of regional geopolitics, revealing fractures that diplomacy had tried to conceal. The attack simultaneously targeted the regime’s political heart in the south and its military strongholds in the north. Sévaré/Mopti, for example, is the country’s nerve centre and main road hub, and its capture cuts the north off from the south. Gao, the northern capital, is the army’s main operational hub in the region and commands a strategic bridge over the Niger River. Bourem is a crossroads between Gao and Timbuktu. Kidal, finally, 1,500 km from Bamako and on Algeria’s doorstep, is the historic heartland of Tuareg rebellions. The very fact of briefly reaching Bamako — JNIM fighters having penetrated the capital’s outskirts and occupied the approaches to the Modibo Keïta International Airport — constitutes an unprecedented political statement. The gravity of the situation is without precedent since the events of March 2012, when Tuareg rebels, quickly ousted by their Islamist allies linked to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, had seized control of Kidal, Gao and Timbuktu. The Nature of the Offensive According to the Malian government, the jihadist attacks aimed, beyond mere terror, to shatter national cohesion and overthrow the institutions of the Transition. The heaviest symbol was undoubtedly the death of General Sadio Camara, the Defence Minister, killed by a suicide car bomb at his own residence in Kati, just fifteen kilometres from the capital — and the country’s main military base. Kidal then passed entirely under the control of the FLA and the JNIM, after Russian Africa Corps forces — the institutional successor to the Russian Wagner group, deployed in Mali since 2021 — concluded a withdrawal agreement and were evacuated to Tessalit, while the Malian soldiers who remained were taken prisoner. This last point deserves dwelling on, as it is arguably the weightiest strategic fact of the week. In November 2023, the Africa Corps had presented its capture of the city as the junta’s founding victory. In less than thirty months, this “founding myth” has been erased. Beyond that, the loss of Kidal reveals an operational defeat of the security model the Malian junta has chosen since 2021: an armed sovereignty resting on the partnership with the Russian Africa Corps, in place of the multilateral frameworks it had dismissed. Yet this partnership, on which Bamako had built a substantial share of its internal legitimacy and international posture, did not hold against a coordinated offensive on a nodal point in the North. The result of the offensive is cataclysmic: roads to Bamako blocked, central cities ensuring north-south connectivity placed under control or fire, and the front line shifted from the north and centre of the country to the very gates of Bamako. The junta staked its bet on a security model whose limits 25 April exposed, and the vulnerabilities revealed by the attack stem as much from internal governance failures that no sincere partner of Mali has an interest in passing over in silence, as from the manoeuvres of external powers. What is also now clear is that the coordination between the FLA and the JNIM transcends the purely military context. The long-held notion of an Azawad rebellion confined to identity-based demands distinct from jihadist structures has been shaken; all these files now appear difficult to keep separate. The signals of this entanglement had been accumulating for years. The Moroccan Response In this context, Morocco’s position had the merit of clarity and coherence. In a communiqué, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, under the direction of Nasser Bourita, expressed its firm condemnation of the terrorist attacks in Mali and reaffirmed its total solidarity with the Malian authorities and people, conveying condolences to the victims’ families. It recalled that Morocco has long warned of the gravity of the situation in several Sahel countries and of the need to strengthen their governments and institutions against terrorist and separatist threats. This stance inscribes itself within a constant doctrine, articulated over years around the respect for state sovereignty, the unequivocal rejection of terrorism, and support for national institutions confronting fragmentation. A doctrine all the more convincing for also serving Rabat’s very real strategic interests in a region where its influence has considerably expanded — the coincidence of national interest and principled consistency conferring upon it precisely the durability that mere tactical calculation could never produce. A Moroccan diplomatic source had specified, as early as 25 April, that Morocco had followed with deep concern the terrorist and separatist attacks targeting Bamako and other cities, emphasising that they had deliberately targeted both civilian and military zones. This responsiveness was the product of an intense strategic rapprochement between Rabat and Bamako, which had reached a remarkable point of diplomatic consecration just weeks before the offensive. The 10 April Turning Point On 10 April 2026, Mali officially withdrew its recognition of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), an entity proclaimed by the Polisario Front — a Sahrawi independence movement backed by Algiers since the 1970s — and historically supported by several African states as a pressure lever against Rabat. This was a position Bamako had maintained for decades. This diplomatic reversal reflects the transitional Malian authorities’ desire to assert an independent and pragmatic foreign policy, grounded in alliances dictated by mutual interests and concrete benefits. The fallout was immediate: the forthcoming abolition of the Electronic Travel Authorisation for Malian nationals travelling to Morocco, as well as the doubling of study grants for Malian students, raised to three hundred per year. This partnership itself inscribed within a broader international dynamic, carried by UN Security Council Resolution 2797, adopted on 31 October 2025 by eleven votes, which renews the MINURSO mandate — the United Nations Mission for the Referendum in Western Sahara — while fully supporting negotiations based on Morocco’s autonomy plan, Algeria having again, as in the previous year, chosen not to participate in the vote. For Algiers, Mali’s 10 April reversal amounts to far more than a diplomatic rebuff. The Malian decision further isolated the Polisario entity on the African scene and sealed a strategic partnership between Bamako and Rabat that deprives Algeria of one of its historic levers of influence in the Sahel. The 25 April attacks come barely fifteen days after this rupture, in a country where the objective conditions for a major JNIM and FLA offensive existed independently of the diplomatic calendar. The progressive blockade of road arteries in the North, documented since autumn 2025, had already constituted a prelude to escalation. Admittedly, reducing causality to the diplomatic sequence alone would be intellectually reductive; yet the chronological correlation supports a more limited and more solid conclusion — namely, that the 25 April attacks were exploited, and no doubt precipitated, in a context where certain regional actors had fresh and powerful reasons to want to demonstrate the fragility of Mali’s choice. The Battle of Narratives The battlefield of arms is not the only terrain on which this crisis is being fought, and it may be on the other terrain that the long-term stakes are most revealing. Several indicators point to the existence of a coordinated information offensive aimed at exploiting the attacks to undermine Mali’s image and sow doubt about its strategic choices — manifesting in sustained activity across social media and certain para-media platforms relaying often unverified content, rumours of Malian officials in flight, exaggerated casualty figures, mass-disseminated institutional collapse scenarios — with the twofold objective of weakening internal confidence in Mali and altering its international perception. On this point, it is necessary to distinguish what is verifiably established from what is interpretation. That disinformation campaigns flourished in the hours following the attacks, on social networks where accounts supporting one side or the other engaged in exchanges mixing disinformation, nationalist outbidding and incitement to violence, is a documented fact, predating the April events and embedded in a longer sequence of Algerian-Malian tensions. That a centralised coordination is responsible: the thesis is entirely plausible, consistent with mechanisms typically observed in other theatres of regional competition. It would, however, require greater proof to be affirmed without reservation. The logic of interest, by contrast, needs no further demonstration: the narrative destabilisation of Mali, in this precise context, only benefits those who have an interest in demonstrating the failure of the 10 April diplomatic turn. The architecture of some of these campaigns rests on a carefully maintained distinction between measured official discourse and more aggressive actions carried out by indirect relays — anonymous accounts, militant influencers, unofficial media — a configuration that allows aggressive narratives to be disseminated while maintaining a form of plausible deniability at the state level. Algerian diplomacy thus chose the path of official clarification, with Foreign Minister Ahmed Attaf reiterating the absolute rejection of all forms of terrorism and recalling Algeria’s historic mediation role in Mali through the 2015 accords — which are precisely those that the junta broke in 2021. Their invocation as proof of good faith reflects a selective reading of recent history that the facts struggle to support. Azawad Is Not the Sahara Among the most revealing rhetorical manoeuvres of recent days is the attempt, observed in several media spaces, to establish an equivalence between the Azawad question and that of the Moroccan Sahara. The comparison is constructed from whole cloth — either to disqualify the Moroccan position by dressing it in Sahelian violence, or to confer on Azawad claims an international legitimacy that the events of 25 April have durably stripped away. The Moroccan Sahara inscribes itself in an international dynamic oriented towards a political solution around autonomy under Moroccan sovereignty, supported by a growing number of actors. This framework remains subject to legal contestations — and Algeria is not alone in formulating them — but it enjoys a now-solid UN anchorage, extensive Western recognition and an active diplomatic process. The situation in northern Mali, by contrast, involves an internal problem marked by armed violence, entanglement with jihadist structures, and the absence of any comparable process. The 25 April offensive demonstrated, irrefutably, that separatism and terrorism no longer constitute separate operational bodies in this theatre. The AES’s Silence One fact deserves noting without equivocation. The Alliance of Sahel States (AES), a confederation grouping Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger since 2023, remained discreet and offered no explicit support to Bamako at the time of the attacks. According to Le Monde, the clearest condemnations of the jihadist offensive against the junta came from its geopolitical adversaries, notably ECOWAS. ECOWAS firmly condemned the 25 April attacks, calling on all states and regional mechanisms to unite in a coordinated effort against terrorism. The solidarity between Sahel states, so often invoked as the ideological foundation of the Alliance, proved more rhetorical than practical at the precise moment when it was most expected — an irony that the Malian junta, in its structural rejection of ECOWAS, will one day have to reckon with in the lucidity that extreme situations always eventually impose. What the Crisis Reveals Beyond the immediate circumstances, the Malian crisis appears more than ever as a revelator of regional competitive dynamics, where security stakes are compounded by informational confrontations and deep geopolitical rivalries. It also reveals the limits of a security governance model that has substituted ideological allegiances for partnerships built over time — and which finds itself, in the hour of trial, more alone than it believed. Countries like Morocco or the United Arab Emirates, engaged in forms of cooperation with Bamako, find themselves at the heart of campaigns aimed at discrediting them or challenging their role — which betrays, precisely, the strategic importance of these partnerships in the eyes of those who are troubled by them. The lesson that emerges from these days concerns the nature of the choice that Sahelian states are called to make: between a sovereignty backed by partnerships founded on mutual respect, unambiguous commitment against terrorism and a long-term vision for regional development, and a dependence on logics of manipulation that exploit their vulnerabilities without ever resolving them. In finding its way back to Rabat, Bamako made a choice whose terms and limits can be debated, but whose underlying coherence withstands scrutiny — and which other actors found sufficiently threatening for the coincidence of dates, in this specific case, to lose much of its innocence. For Mali is as much a geopolitical testing ground as a partner. And what 25 April revealed is the structural limit of that model. The most striking example is Russia — a power that presents itself as the guarantor of its African partners’ security, but whose credibility is directly put to the test every time that security fails. The question now posed, to which no answer is yet possible, is this: if the junta falters for good, will Moscow defend its partner, or its mines? Such is the perennial and painful question that history poses, from time immemorial, to all those who have the misfortune of being at once coveted and fragile — and who, carried away by the intoxication of power and believing themselves invincible, come to forget their primary condition.

The victory of Peter Magyar and his party “Tisza” marks a historic turning point in the Hungarian political landscape, ending sixteen years of Viktor Orbán's rule and his Fidesz party. The elections were described as the most important in decades, not only because of the record popular turnout, but also because their outcome granted the opposition a two-thirds majority in parliament, enabling it to amend the constitution and roll back the illiberal policies Orbán had entrenched during his years in power. The new president Magyar pledged to restore press freedom and reform state media, in a move aimed at dismantling the system of information control on which the previous regime had relied. The great surprise was Orbán's acknowledgment of defeat immediately after the results, without attempting to cling to power by force, which spared the country a political crisis or violent protests. Causes of Defeat The defeat was not born of a single electoral moment, but was rather the product of accumulated economic, social, and political pressures that had gradually eroded Orbán's legitimacy. Moreover, Magyar's organised campaign — he had previously been an ally of Orbán — succeeded in uniting the opposition behind a single figure capable of genuinely competing with Fidesz. Orbán's reliance on negative propaganda and fear-mongering had also ceased to convince voters and instead turned against him, as his messaging lost credibility in the face of a deteriorating economic reality. 1. Orbán's Rise and the Construction of the Economic Model Since the crisis of 2008, Viktor Orbán built his popularity on a promise of economic prosperity and a "work-based society," with a focus on job creation and making citizens more self-reliant. This model rested on low-wage foreign investment, attracting foreign companies to employ local labour at reduced salaries with the aim of lowering production costs and increasing the country's competitiveness on global markets. While this model does generate employment, it leaves the national economy fragile before global crises and limits the capacity to improve living standards. 2. Economic Stagnation and the Decline of the Model Orbán's successes in raising employment slowed markedly after the Covid pandemic and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, exposing the fragility of the economic model on which his years of rule had depended. Hungary, which had prided itself on high employment rates in the previous decade, found itself from 2022 onwards facing a harsh economic reality: near-zero growth and the highest inflation in the European Union, directly affecting citizens' daily lives through rising prices and a decline in purchasing power. Yet the crisis was not merely economic; it deepened into a profound social and political crisis. Citizens felt that Orbán's promises of building a "work-based society" were no longer achievable in the face of global crises and market pressures. 3. Erosion of Popular Support and Ethical Crises Despite the high voter turnout, Fidesz's electoral base shrank from 3.1 to 2.3 million voters, a clear indicator of the erosion of public trust in Orbán and his party. This decline was not simply a natural consequence of economic factors; it was compounded by ethical and political crises that damaged the party's image, most notably scandals involving the cover-up of child sexual abuse cases, which undermined the party's legitimacy and its capacity to present itself as the guardian of traditional values. Frustration grew over pervasive corruption and the glaring social inequality highlighted by images of the lavish palaces owned by the ruling elite, in contrast with the hardships endured by the middle and working classes, widening the gulf of trust between the people and the government. All of this contributed to the rise of his rival Peter Magyar, who was able to capitalise on the general loss of confidence and present himself as a more upright and competent alternative. 4. Cultural Discourse and External Admiration In the face of internal decline, Orbán attempted to compensate through nationalist and cultural discourse by means of what are known as the "culture wars," directing attention towards questions of identity and the defence of the nation against "globalism." He portrayed the European Union, international financial institutions, and liberal organisations as "globalist" forces threatening Hungary's identity and culture, focusing on border protection, rejection of European migration policies, and the assertion of "traditional values" against what he regarded as a deconstruction of family and society. Yet despite his anti-globalisation rhetoric, his economic model depended on foreign investment — German car manufacturers, Chinese battery factories — making him vulnerable to global fluctuations. That is to say, while presenting himself as a leader resisting the "liberal globalisation" imposed by Brussels and the West, he had in practice bound the Hungarian economy to globalisation. In foreign policy, Orbán leaned closer to Russia, opposing European Union policies toward Ukraine, and became a symbol of alliances hostile to Western globalisation. He also received direct support from Trump, who saw in him a model for populist nationalism opposed to liberal globalisation. He consequently became an icon of the global populist right, a star of conservative conferences around the world — such as the Conservative Political Action Conference, where he presented himself as a "David" resisting a "Goliath of globalisation." This American annual conference, attended by Donald Trump as its headline figure, became a platform for the global export of conservative populist discourse, particularly after a version of it was hosted in Hungary, being cited across Europe and Latin America as a source of inspiration for the nationalist right. Yet this right-wing populist identitarian cultural discourse, which had previously been an effective instrument for mobilising support, was no longer sufficient in the face of economic deterioration and degraded public services. Voters had become more preoccupied with rising prices and declining living standards than with nationalist slogans. Meanwhile, nationalist leaders across Europe and the United States continued to extol Orbán as a symbol of resistance to globalisation, regarding his experiment as a model for confronting "global threats." But this external admiration remained detached from Hungary's internal reality, changing nothing in the daily suffering of its citizens or in the decline of their trust in the system. 5. International Repercussions These results represent a blow to the nationalist and divisive discourse of which Orbán had been the standard-bearer, and reveal the limits of this model's effectiveness, particularly in Europe. Russia is among the biggest losers, having lost its most powerful voice within the European Union in what concerned the obstruction of aid to Ukraine. The United States under the Trump administration has lost a prominent ally in Europe, despite its attempts to support Orbán before the elections. China, as usual, watches with caution, having invested heavily in Hungary's electric vehicle sector; its interests may be affected should Magyar recalibrate his orientation to strengthen ties with the European Union. Perhaps the biggest loser is the global populist right, particularly its allies in France: Marine Le Pen and her Rassemblement National, and Éric Zemmour with his Reconquête party. Among the other major losers are the Law and Justice party (PiS) in Poland, Nigel Farage and the Reform Party in the United Kingdom, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, and former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. But the greatest winners are, first and foremost, the Hungarian people, who expressed their rejection of corruption and authoritarianism, alongside the European Union, which has recovered a partner more aligned with its orientations, and Ukraine, which may now find it easier to secure support within the Union following the retreat of pro-Russian influence. The recent Hungarian elections were not merely an internal change of power, but a global message against right-wing populism and corruption, and a blow to Russian and American attempts to influence Europe. Orbán's experiment reveals the limits of "pro-worker conservatism": it succeeds when it delivers tangible economic promises, but collapses when tested by global crises. The elections also demonstrated the limits of "informational authoritarianism": when the economy deteriorates and the opposition unites behind a strong alternative, instruments of disinformation and propaganda become less effective and lose their capacity to determine outcomes. Orbán's fall was not solely the result of his authoritarianism or cultural discourse, but of the failure of his economic model and the erosion of ethical trust in his party. The experience reveals that regimes dependent on the control of information are not impregnable, and that they collapse when they lose credibility before economic and political crises. Magyar's success, for its part, reflects the inclination of voters toward a more capable, moderate centrist alternative, gathering both centre and liberal left, even though he is conservative and shares some of Fidesz's policies. Magyar therefore does not represent a radical shift in public policy so much as a declaration that Orbán's era has exhausted its momentum. The challenge before Magyar remains that of achieving genuine reforms capable of rebuilding public trust, without losing the support of voters who were originally part of Fidesz's base.

The yellow line drawn across southern Lebanese soil is not merely a military demarcation. It is a warning from history. Israel has established a military zone stretching roughly ten kilometers north of the border inside southern Lebanon. Israel through its Prime Minister has made its position unambiguous: "This is a security strip ten kilometers deep, which is much stronger, more intense, more continuous and more solid than what we had previously. That is where we are and we are not leaving." [1] The vocabulary is familiar. Analysts have described what is unfolding as the " Gazafication " of southern Lebanon — Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz having instructed the army to demolish Lebanese border villages based on the Beit Hanoun and Rafah models. [2] We know what those models look like. Nothing remains. The parallel with Gaza is chilling enough. But there is an older and closer precedent for Lebanon itself: the Golan Heights [3] . Depopulation, followed by long-term military occupation, followed by annexation. By mid-April, more than one million Lebanese had been displaced, and over 2,000 killed. [4] More than 80 towns and villages have been emptied, and more than fifteen percent of Lebanon's population uprooted. [5] A land emptied of its people is a land made available for other purposes. If Lebanon allows this dynamic to calcify — if the south remains depopulated, its bridges destroyed, its villages demolished — then the creeping annexation of its territory will not require a formal declaration. It will simply become a fact on the ground, as it did in the Golan five decades ago. The so-called ' Axis of resistance' spent decades wrapping military confrontation in the language of liberation, yet not a single meter of the Golan Heights was ever recovered; whatever emotional resonance that posture carried among its supporters, it was never a strategy — it was a pose, one that confused defiance with efficacy and stubbornly refused to reckon with the actual balance of power. The only instrument capable of reversing this trajectory is diplomacy. And diplomacy requires a state with the authority to conduct it. The Author of Lebanon's Calamity Must Be Named It was Hezbollah that dragged Lebanon into this war — not to defend Lebanese sovereignty, but to serve Iran. When the US and Israel struck Iran in late February 2026 and killed Supreme Leader Khamenei, Hezbollah fired projectiles at Israel, stating that the action was taken in response to Khamenei's assassination. [6] Lebanon's Prime Minister Nawaf Salam called it what it was: an " irresponsible " act endangering Lebanon's safety and security. The Lebanese state had not decided on war. Its government had not been consulted. A non-state actor subordinate to a foreign power had, once again, made that decision for the Lebanese people. The Iranian Revolutionary Guards, operating inside Lebanon on forged passports, were directing Hezbollah's military operations. Lebanon had not chosen this war. It had been conscripted into it, its territory used as a platform for Iran's regional strategy, its people paying the price in blood and displacement. On August 5, 2025, the Lebanese cabinet held a landmark meeting at Baabda Palace and tasked the Lebanese Army with developing a plan to consolidate all arms in the country under state security forces [7] . On August 7, the government formally responded to US proposals with a commitment to a phased disarmament process. Hezbollah's answer was contempt. Hezbollah vowed there would be no disarmament and gave a clear warning that any attempt to confront would mean " no life " for Lebanon. [8] In other words: submit or face civil war. This is not the posture of a resistance movement. It is the posture of an occupation within. Then came March 2, 2026 — a date that should be inscribed in Lebanese political memory. Following an emergency cabinet meeting, the government announced a total ban on all of Hezbollah's military activities, demanding the group surrender its weapons to the state and restrict itself to political activities only. He affirmed that decisions on war and peace rest exclusively with the Lebanese state. [9] It was the most explicit assertion of sovereignty Beirut had made in decades against Hezbollah. The government also called on the Lebanese Armed Forces to immediately and firmly begin implementing its disarmament plan north of the Litani River, using all necessary means. [10] Hezbollah's response was to attack the messengers, accusing the Lebanese’s government of "backstabbing" its group by declaring its military activities illegal and accused it of becoming a tool for Israel . [11] Historic Decisions Require Historic Implementation The August 5 and August 7 decisions were, by any measure, unprecedented. For the first time, a Lebanese government formally tasked its military with asserting the state monopoly on arms — a direct challenge to Hezbollah's parallel military structure. Yet the gap between decision and implementation has been the defining ambiguity of Lebanon's political condition — and that ambiguity is now dangerous in a very specific way. When a state declares that it holds the monopoly on force but cannot enforce that declaration, it does not project sovereignty. It projects weakness. It invites two parallel and mutually reinforcing disasters: it gives Hezbollah the signal that the government can be defied with impunity, and it gives Israel the pretext to act in Lebanon's stead. Was the failure of implementation a lack of will, or a lack of capability? Lebanon cannot afford to let that question remain open. If it is a lack of will, then the government must find the political courage to act, backed by the broad Lebanese public that is exhausted by wars fought on behalf of foreign patrons. If it is a lack of capability — which is the more honest answer — then Lebanon must urgently seek to acquire that capability. The Case for an International Force The Lebanese Government has made its decisions. What it now needs is the international community to stand behind them politically, economically and militarily so that sovereign declarations do not remain words on paper. The Lebanese Army, bound by its constitutional mandate, faces an extraordinarily complex operational environment — caught between a heavily armed non-state actor backed by a regional power and supported by a segment of the Lebanese population on one side, and an Israeli military occupying its southern territory on the other — and cannot reasonably be expected to resolve this equation without substantial international support in resources, equipment, and political backing. This is where an international military force becomes not merely useful but necessary — a force that would support the Lebanese Army in enforcing the government's own decisions, and in implementing both the letter and the spirit of UN Security Council Resolutions 1559 [12] and 1701 [13] , which have mandated the disarmament of non-state armed groups in Lebanon and the extension of the Lebanese state's authority over all of its territory. UNIFIL has entered the final year of its operations, following the Security Council's decision in August 2025 to extend its mandate for a final time until 31 December 2026. [14] This end-of-mandate moment is not just a logistical deadline. It is a political opening. The question is not whether to replace UNIFIL, but what replaces it and with what mandate. A successor force — whether under UN auspices or constituted as a coalition of willing states — must be fundamentally different from its predecessor. UNIFIL's passive posture, patrolling while Hezbollah rebuilt its arsenal around it, has been conclusively discredited. If the dynamics of the UN Security Council — including the threat of vetoes [15] — make a formal UN mandate impossible, then the model of a coalition of the willing becomes the viable alternative. Lebanon has friends. It has allies who share a strategic interest in a stable, sovereign Lebanese state: Italy, France, Germany, the United States, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Egypt, and other regional and international partners that have expressed support for Lebanon’s sovereignty, institutional recovery, and freedom from external domination., which have made clear their support for a Lebanon free of Iranian tutelage; the United States, which is providing an unprecedented level of diplomatic investment in Lebanon's trajectory. That American support deserves special emphasis. President Trump announced the ceasefire personally, stating that Washington has prohibited Israel from bombing Lebanon and would work with Beirut to deal with Hezbollah. The Trump administration is, at this moment, the only external actor capable of exerting meaningful pressure on Israel — pressure that Lebanon urgently needs to secure Israeli withdrawal from the south and to prevent the yellow line from becoming permanent. This is engagement, and Lebanon must leverage it. A Window that Will Not Stay Open The regional geopolitical landscape has shifted in Lebanon's favor in ways that seemed inconceivable two years ago. Iran is weakened, its regional network battered. The Arab world — from Riyadh to Abu Dhabi to Cairo — has reached a rare consensus: Lebanese sovereignty must be restored, and Lebanon must not again be a theatre for Iran's proxy wars. There is an alignment of interests between Beirut, Washington, the Arab world, and most of Europe that Lebanon has rarely, if ever, enjoyed simultaneously. This window will not remain open. The yellow line is being entrenched into concrete and demolished villages. Every week that passes without the implementation of the government's own decisions is a week in which the facts on the ground harden against Lebanon's interests. Lebanon's government has shown remarkable institutional courage — in August 2025, in March 2026, in the direct talks in Washington, in President Aoun's defiant insistence that Lebanon will negotiate its own future. That concrete step must now be matched by a commensurately bold international response. An effective multinational force with a robust mandate, backed by American political pressure on Israel and Arab economic support for reconstruction, is not a fantasy. It is precisely what the moment demands. The Golan was lost because no one came. Lebanon cannot afford to repeat that lesson. [1] Al Jazeera, Lebanon coverage, 2026 https://www.aljazeera.com/tag/lebanon [2] Al Jazeera – Coverage of Southern Lebanon / Israeli Buffer Zone / Lebanon Conflict https://www.aljazeera.com/tag/lebanon/ [3] Golan Heights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golan_Heights [4] Reuters – More than One Million Displaced by Israeli Strikes in Lebanon https://www.reuters.com/pictures/lebanon-more-than-million-displaced-by-israeli-strikes-2026-04-15/ [5] US-Israel war on Iran: What next for Lebanon? https://www.chathamhouse.org/events/all/standard-event/us-israel-war-iran-what-next-lebanon [6] Security Council Report https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/monthly-forecast/2026-03/lebanon-37.php [7] Lebanese Government Instructs Army to Develop Plan for State Monopoly on Weapons as Hezbollah Refuses to Disarm https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2025/08/05/lebanese-government-instructs-army-to-develop-plan-for-state-monopoly-on-weapons-as-hezbollah-refuses-to-disarm/ [8] Lebanon's Hezbollah rejects disarmament, warns of civil war https://www.dw.com/en/lebanons-hezbollah-rejects-disarmament-warns-of-civil-war/a-73730563 [9] Government announces 'total ban on any military activity' by Hezbollah https://today.lorientlejour.com/article/1496916/government-announces-total-ban-on-any-military-activity-by-hezbollah.html [10] Security Council Report https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/monthly-forecast/2026-03/lebanon-37.php [11] Hezbollah leader urges Lebanon’s government to pull out of Israel talks https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/13/hezbollah-leader-urges-lebanon-government-to-pull-out-of-israel-talks [12] UN Security Council Resolution 1559 (2004) https://undocs.org/S/RES/1559(2004) [13] UN Security Council Resolution 1701 (2006) https://undocs.org/S/RES/1701(2006) [14] Security Council Report https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-documents/lebanon/ [15] UN Security Council Working Methods https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/un-security-council-working-methods/the-veto .

Access to the state in Lebanon no longer follows the direct path it ought to follow in any modern political system. A relationship that should rest on clearly defined rights and mutually acknowledged obligations has gradually transformed into a complex web of informal channels, in which the citizen no longer deals with the state directly, but with whoever 'grants access' to it. Yet the mutation has not stopped there, for intermediation has ceased to be a mere bridge between citizen and state and has become, in many cases, an outright substitute for it — through the construction of parallel structures that reproduce the state outside its own boundaries. What we witness today goes well beyond conventional corruption. It is no longer a matter of transgressing existing rules, but of displacing them with others. The citizen no longer obtains what is rightfully his through institutional channels, but through an intermediary who redefines that right as a service, or through an alternative institution that arises outside the state while performing its functions. In this sense, the problem no longer lies solely in the weakness of the state, but in the emergence of a parallel cartel that acts in its place and reconfigures the relationship between citizen and authority. This transformation did not occur overnight. It began with the methodical weakening of the state — through the paralysis of its institutions, the systematic delay of its services, and the progressive erosion of trust in it. Political forces then moved to fill this vacuum, not merely through mediation but by establishing alternative structures in the fields of health, education, and social services. Over time, the citizen ceased to turn to the state except as a secondary option, finding himself instead caught in a double dependency — torn between an intermediary who clears the way and a parallel institution that delivers the service. Across different sectors, this same equation has reproduced itself. In essential services, the state is no longer the effective reference, having ceded its place to parallel cartels of production and distribution. In health care, access to treatment is no longer linked solely to official institutions, but to a web of support networks and substitute structures. In education, grant and assistance mechanisms have emerged outside the traditional institutional framework. And in the labour market, competence alone no longer determines opportunity, supplanted by membership in networks of influence. In the financial sector, this mutation manifests with particular sharpness. The banking system has ceased to be a unified framework governed by legible rules, having become instead a space where personal relationships intertwine with legal provisions. During the crisis, not all depositors stood on equal footing in their ability to access their funds, and parallel channels emerged for managing transfers and settlements. The question was no longer what one had a right to, but who could effectively exercise that right. Money itself was thus transformed, passing from the status of a legal right to that of a privilege conditioned by influence. Despite all this, the cartel did not impose itself by coercion alone, having prospered because it addressed a genuine need. In the absence of the state, the citizen seeks a swift solution rather than a protracted legal process. And as trust in institutions erodes, the personal relationship proves all the more effective. It is this dynamic that has allowed the parallel cartel not merely to survive, but to expand and entrench itself. The result now exceeds the mere retreat of the state and touches upon the emergence of a full structural duality. The citizen lives between two systems — one official and weakened, the other parallel and at times more functional. Rights have not disappeared, but have split between these two systems, deepening dependency and hollowing out the very notion of citizenship. What is most alarming in this picture is not the existence of intermediation itself, but the success of the substitute. When the parallel cartel proves faster and more present, the state is relegated to the rank of a secondary option. The problem no longer lies in the weakness of the state, but in the fact that it is not always perceived as a necessity by the citizen. In this reality, the question is no longer how to reform the state, but whether the bond linking citizen to state still holds at all. Between an intermediary who connects the citizen to the state and substitute institutions that dispense with it altogether, a new model of governance is taking shape — one that no longer rests on the state alone, but on a plurality of power and service centres. And here the real question surfaces: are we confronted with a weakened state striving to recover, or with a cartel that has succeeded in building its own substitute?

Delivered at a critical moment, following the entry into force of the ceasefire with Israel, the speech by Lebanese President Joseph Aoun stands out as one of the clearest in tone and most ambitious in its political aspirations. Neither an ordinary speech of appeasement nor a ceremonial statement of thanks, it amounted rather to a sweeping declaration of intent: to redefine Lebanon’s position, recover the State’s decision-making authority, and engage in a negotiation process supposedly different from everything that has come before. But between the force of the speech and the reality of the balance of power, the real questions arise: are we witnessing a genuine turning point, or a speech that runs ahead of the State’s actual capabilities? The Structure of the Speech — From Gratitude to the Announcement of a Course The speech opens on a point of convergence: expressions of thanks. Thanks to various states, and foremost to “friend Donald Trump,” to Saudi Arabia, and to all the parties that contributed to the ceasefire. This opening is not incidental. It aims to anchor an image of international support and to lend external legitimacy to the course that will subsequently be proposed. But the speech quickly moves from thanks to the essential: the announcement that Lebanon is entering “the phase of permanent agreements.” It is precisely here that the true political dimension begins. The president does not merely describe what has happened — he sets out what is to come: negotiations, agreements, a long process that goes beyond a simple ceasefire. The Central Message — “We Have Recovered Lebanon’s Decision” The key formulation of the speech is the following: “We have recovered Lebanon and Lebanon’s decision, for the first time in nearly half a century.” This sentence encapsulates the essence of the speech, yet at the same time it carries the highest degree of complexity. What does it mean concretely? That Lebanon did not previously command its own decision, that the current period represents a qualitative turning point, and that the State is now the sole instance that decides and negotiates. Yet this is precisely where the major challenge emerges: is this a realistic assessment, or a declaration of objectives? For the recovery of sovereign decision-making in Lebanon is not achieved through a speech, but through a profound transformation of internal power dynamics — and in particular on the question of the State’s monopoly over arms and security decisions, a question that has not yet been resolved, either politically or practically. This formulation can therefore be read more as a “statement of intent” than as a description of an accomplished reality. The Defense of Negotiation and the Breaking of a Political Taboo One of the most striking features of the speech is the boldness with which negotiation is presented as a legitimate — indeed necessary — choice. The president left no room for ambiguity, insisting that negotiating is neither a sign of weakness, nor a retreat, nor a concession. This passage targets directly the environment hostile to any negotiation process with Israel, which has always equated negotiation with capitulation. What the president is attempting here is an operation of “redefinition”: transforming negotiation from an accusation into a sovereign instrument, linking it to the protection of the people rather than to the abandonment of rights, and placing it within the framework of the State rather than within external backroom dealings. This proposition, despite its clarity, runs up against a divided political and social reality, where a large part of Lebanese opinion continues to regard any negotiation as crossing red lines. The Discourse Against “Absurd Wars” — An Indirect Confrontation In several passages, the president attacks the logic of repeated wars, using striking formulations: “absurd, gratuitous, and periodic death,” “dying for something that is not Lebanon,” “between suicide and prosperity.” These are not ordinary phrases. They carry an implicit indictment of a course maintained for years, built on anchoring Lebanon within regional conflicts. For the first time with such clarity, two options are placed before the Lebanese: to persevere in the logic of wars, or to shift into the logic of the State and of life. But here again, the problem lies not in the diagnosis but in the capacity to change this reality. Arms and the State — The Most Sensitive Formulation Among the most serious and significant passages in the speech is the affirmation that the authority of the State must extend across the entire territory “by its own forces exclusively,” and that a “single armed force protects us all.” These formulations, without explicitly naming any party, are unambiguous in their import: they point to the monopoly of arms by the State. Why does this matter? Because it is precisely here that the crux of the Lebanese crisis lies — the presence of arms outside the State’s framework, the duplication of security decision-making, and the anchoring of these arms within regional calculations. The president places this issue at the heart of the coming phase, without however proposing a precise mechanism for achieving it. And this is where the true challenge lies: moving from the slogan of the “monopoly of arms” to an implementation plan requires an internal consensus that does not yet exist. The Popular Dimension — A Speech of Rational Mobilization The speech was not addressed solely to political elites — it turned resolutely toward public opinion, with an explicit call to reject accusations of treason, to resist being swept up by slogans, and to allow reason to prevail over instinct. This dimension reflects an awareness that any political change in Lebanon requires popular backing, or at the very least a reduction in public tensions. But in return, Lebanese society remains deeply divided, which exposes any unifying discourse to contradictory readings. The International Dimension — Anchoring the Partnership By thanking the United States and Saudi Arabia, the president seeks to establish an international umbrella for the new course. Two objectives emerge: to reassure the outside world that Lebanon is moving toward stability, and to secure political and economic support for the coming phase. But this also raises a question: is this course genuinely autonomous, or tied to external conditions? Between Boldness and Risk-Taking There is no question that the speech carries a manifest political audacity: publicly raising the question of negotiation, speaking of the monopoly of arms, refusing proxy wars. But this boldness carries with it a considerable risk — that of raising the threshold of expectations without guaranteeing the capacity to meet them, of opening an undeclared internal political confrontation, of placing the State before a difficult test. Are We Facing a Founding Moment? The speech presents itself as a decisive turning point: the end of “Lebanon-as-arena” and the beginning of “Lebanon-as-State.” But Lebanese history is strewn with similar moments that never came to fruition. What will determine the outcome is the convergence of several factors: genuine political will, the State’s capacity to impose its decisions, the position of the essential internal forces, and international and regional support. If these elements converge, the speech may prove to be the beginning of a turning point. Otherwise, it will remain in the realm of aspiration. In Conclusion — A Speech That Founds a Larger Question President Joseph Aoun’s speech goes beyond a simple political stance — it is an attempt to repose Lebanon’s fundamental question: do we truly want a State? The president offered a clear answer: yes, one State, one decision, one armed force, and a negotiation process that protects the country. But the real challenge lies not in formulating this project, but rather in the capacity to impose it on a complex reality, where domestic interests are intertwined with regional calculations. The speech charted the direction, without deciding the path. And it is here that the judgment on this address depends on what follows: either it will be the opening of a genuinely sovereign process, or it will join the pantheon of the most powerful speeches… that changed nothing.

Ruling Hungary with unchallenged authority since 2010, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has now been defeated at the polls, swept from office by public fatigue over corruption and perceived assaults on the rule of law. Now 62, he asserted himself on the international stage through repeated clashes with Brussels and his overt ties with U.S. President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Orbán also shocked with his indulgence toward far-right ecosystem and the broader autocratic network in Europe and around the world. Viktor Orbán received by Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street in January 2002, a year before the ill-fated invasion of Iraq built on spurious claims. According to Voltaire, “Politics is the art of lying at the right time.” (Gerry Penny/AFP) At the NATO summit in Washington in 1999, Orbán – then a young prime minister of a Hungary newly admitted to the Alliance – was mistaken for an interpreter by security personnel. “No, sir,” he reportedly replied to the officer, “I am the Prime Minister of Hungary, but I would be happy to interpret if you wish.” The anecdote, illustrative of his relative anonymity at the time, illustrates the still marginal position occupied by Central Europe’s new democracies in the late 1990s within the Euro-Atlantic order. Hungary, newly emerged from the Soviet sphere, was not yet seen as a major political actor – still less its leader. Champion of “Illiberalism” The man once mistaken for an interpreter has gradually established himself as a central figure of “illiberalism.” Popularized by Orbán himself, the concept refers to a system in which power is exercised by bypassing individual freedoms, the rule of law and the separation of powers, while preserving the institutional appearance of democracy. In practical terms, elections continue to be held, but the press and the opposition are placed under pressure, the judiciary loses its independence and checks and balances are weakened. In the Hungarian case, this is compounded by heightened nationalism and a socially conservative outlook rooted in another era: any resemblance to populism is far from accidental. Yet the young Orbán himself experienced the realities of communist dictatorship, when Hungary was still within the Soviet orbit. He first made a name for himself as a committed liberal, co-founding the “Alliance of Young Democrats,” the future backbone of the Fidesz party, and challenging the regime in 1989 with a passionate speech in favor of democracy. The shift occurred gradually. Orbán adopted a more authoritarian discourse, targeting the independence of the judiciary, the media and key institutions. Returning to power in 2010 in a country weakened by the economic crisis, he set about methodically consolidating his party’s grip over the state apparatus, universities and the media, in the name of defending the “Hungarian nation.” His restrictions on freedoms, particularly those affecting the LGBTQ+ community, led to tensions with the European Union, which decided to freeze several billion euros in funds earmarked for Hungary. Defending family, rural or Christian values is not in itself objectionable. What is, however, is the use of a well-honed strategy: instrumentalizing fears to seize power, spreading xenophobia and fueling Europhobia under the guise of patriotism. Post-Communism Formerly communist Europe went through a painful transition. Societies in the East experienced a genuine shock as they moved to liberal democracy. The old system, despite its constraints, provided a form of stability, a comfort zone. They had to learn to govern themselves without the experience of Western societies. Even today, the differences between the two halves of the former continent remain visible, as if the vanished wall continued to exist in an immaterial form. September 1989: East Germans crossing the Hungarian border en route to West Germany in their now-legendary Trabants, a symbol of the decay of communist economies. (Christophe Simon/AFP) In Germany, for instance, “Wessis” still sometimes mock “Ossis”, more than three decades after reunification. Much like East German Trabants – cars made from cotton-reinforced resin – set against West German BMWs. This divide is not limited to economics or technology; it also concerns mentalities. It is therefore unsurprising that far-right parties today perform better in former communist regions. The Nationalist Turn After consolidating his conservative base, Viktor Orbán drew on a nationalism deeply rooted in Hungarian society, shaped by a historical sense of isolation and insecurity within a nation surrounded by three major cultural spheres: Slavic, Latin and Germanic. This reflex is not unique to Hungary. In Poland, Serbia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, distrust of the “outsider” remains a powerful political driver. In this context, Orbán has taken a firm stance against European migration policies, going so far as to have a several-hundred-kilometer fence built in 2015 to prevent migrants from entering the country. His strategy rests on the designation of an external enemy. As the political scientist and Hungarian MP Zsuzsanna Szelényi has noted, this logic enabled him to win decisive victories in the 2014, 2018 and 2022 elections. Dangerous Ties with Russia In his latest campaign, after communists and migrants, Ukraine became the main target. Accused of seeking to drag Hungary into a war with Russia, it served as a scapegoat in an increasingly polarized discourse. The campaign relied in particular on disinformation and the use of content generated by artificial intelligence. Tabloids close to the government circulated manipulated images, amplified by networks of fake accounts. Orbán has never severed ties with Putin, even after the invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s international isolation. (Alexander Nemenov/AFP) Experts also point to Russian influence operations, including deepfake videos and content presented as news articles. Posters funded by public money portray Volodymyr Zelensky negatively, sometimes alongside European figures, in deliberately provocative staging. Orbán did not hesitate to declare at a rally: “We must choose who will form the government: me or Zelensky!” Despite its excesses, this rhetoric is rooted in a real fear: that of Hungary being drawn into a conflict. “The Fidesz appeals to the deepest need for existential security,” Zsuzsanna Szelényi told AFP. “Their message is: when the world falls apart, trust what you already have.” Identity Tropism and Lebanese Links In recent years, Viktor Orbán has methodically built a transnational network grounded in an identitarian and political reading of Christianity, conceived both as a civilizational framework and as a lever of influence. This strategy has taken the form of numerous conferences and forums held in Budapest, bringing together conservative and Christian actors from Europe and the Middle East in an openly stated logic of ideological convergence. As early as 2019, Gebran Bassil, leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, took part in a conference on the “persecution of Christians” in Hungary, where he secured financial support for ecclesiastical projects. Budapest simultaneously launched, in the same spirit, a fund for the “reconstruction of churches” in Lebanon. This orientation was reinforced in 2025 with a conference held in Budapest entitled “The Future of Lebanon from a Christian Perspective,” organized and supported by the Hungarian government, which brought together several Lebanese Christian parties. The initiative is part of a broader Hungarian policy aimed at positioning itself as a protector of Christians in the Middle East, while forging political alliances with their representatives. Within this framework, Christian parties in the Middle East – and in particular the Free Patriotic Movement – appear as peripheral but symbolically valuable partners, allowing Orbán to anchor his project of a “Europe of Christian nationalisms” in a broader geopolitical and civilizational dimension. This rhetoric of “protecting Middle Eastern Christians” is also what Vladimir Putin invoked when intervening in Syria. Moreover, from the mid-2010s and the early years of the Syrian war, Budapest adopted a distinctive line within the European Union by refusing to fully break with Damascus. Without officially recognizing the regime, the Hungarian government maintained open channels of communication and opposed any policy of regime change in Syria. This position fits into a broader geopolitical vision in which Orbán views Assad’s fall as opening the way to radical Islamist forces and new waves of migration towards Europe. In this perspective, Assad ceases to be merely a problematic autocrat and becomes, in Budapest’s implicit discourse, a functional bulwark. This indirect rapprochement was also reflected in Hungary’s so-called “Christian protection” policy, notably through the Hungary Helps program. The initiative financed reconstruction projects in Syria, often in areas under regime control, prompting criticism within the EU, with some seeing it as a form of creeping normalization of Damascus. Without ever explicitly embracing Assad, Orbán thus contributed to undermining the European consensus of isolation, introducing an alternative logic: that of a civilizational pragmatism in which the survival of Christian communities justifies the maintenance of relations – even indirect ones – with the existing power. Europhobia Paradoxically, despite Hungary being a major beneficiary of European funds, the Orbán government has displayed outright hostility towards the EU. For years, Brussels has had to contend with a leader maintaining close ties with both Moscow and Washington, repeatedly obstructing key decisions, particularly on aid to Ukraine and sanctions against Russia. Orbán has regularly used his veto power to block European initiatives, contributing to the paralysis of several major dossiers. More seriously, revelations by The Washington Post have pointed to the possible leaking of sensitive information to Russia. According to these reports, Hungary’s foreign minister is said to have kept Moscow informed in real time about internal discussions within the European Union. Faced with these allegations, official reactions in Budapest have ranged from dismissal to defiance. Blatant Corruption But above all, it was corruption that precipitated Orbán’s downfall. Despite a carefully calibrated campaign, voters punished a system marked by the spectacular enrichment of the Prime Minister’s entourage and the deterioration of public services. Officially, Orbán declares modest personal wealth. But in a country ranked among the most corrupt in the European Union, this display of frugality is hardly convincing. Hungarians denounce a quasi-feudal system in which those close to power accumulate wealth and influence. His father, his son-in-law, and his business allies have seen their fortunes grow exponentially, often through public procurement contracts financed by the European Union. According to Transparency International, billions of euros are lost each year due to corrupt practices, while Brussels maintains the freezing of significant funds. What of His Successor? Péter Magyar, the parliamentary election winner, wearing the traditional Hungarian jacket, the bocskai, at an election rally last March. (Balint Szentgallay/NurPhoto via AFP) The winner of Sunday’s election, Péter Magyar, inherits an immense task: dismantling the political architecture built by Orbán, restoring institutions, and rebuilding ties with the European Union. A former insider of the system, he retains some of his predecessor’s hardline positions, particularly on immigration and social issues, but promises to restore the rule of law and combat corruption. For many Europeans, he embodies an “Orbán without corruption and without Europhobia” – a formula that remains to be tested. Beyond Hungary, the stakes are global. Orbán had become a reference point for numerous nationalist movements. His defeat represents a symbolic setback for the far right, without however signaling its disappearance. In Central Europe, as in the United States with the “MAGA” camp, or in Russia, the dynamics that propelled Orbán remain active. The page may be turning in Budapest. But the model itself has not yet had its last word.