by Kim Ghattas - Foreign Policy

BEIRUT — They celebrated the results by gathering their candidates, volunteers, and supporters at a seaside events hall here in the capital. Several hundred people sang, cheered, and swayed to the traditional dabke line dance.

And yet Beirut Madinati, or “Beirut My City,” a group of 24 citizens who had just run in the city’s municipal elections — many of them young professionals, most of them secular, half of them women — had actually lost. So what were they celebrating?

The upstart movement, formed a few short months before the election and with only a small, underfunded ground operation, had taken on Lebanon’s entrenched political overlords and sectarian political establishment and garnered a staggering 40 percent of the vote.

Reuters, Ministers and members of parliament belonging to Lebanon's Hezbollah could be sanctioned under a new U.S. law targeting the group's finances, a U.S. Treasury official said on Friday.

by Hugo Shorter the UK ambassador to Lebanon

Lebanon “commemorates” today the two year anniversary since it last had a President.

Notre Dame University recently marked the 500th anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia. Erasmus thought More’s genius was "such as England never had and never again will have." But beyond his national importance to my country, I think Thomas More is relevant to modern-day Lebanon.

What is Lebanon’s utopia? Today’s presidential vacuum is an unwelcome reminder of the blockages in the sectarian system which can paralyse and weaken the state. Undoubtedly, Lebanon’s utopia must be based on co-existence. However the key thing is this: those who want to preserve a form of co-existence should want a strong state.