The rise and fall of Beirut’s ‘Baladiye’

In the gray world of Lebanon’s ongoing political and economic crises, Beirut’s Weygand Street feels illusory. Despite the pink tabebuia trees lining the street, releasing their fragrant scent of spring, the reality remains bleak.

Under the watchful eyes of the parliamentary police, the municipal guard agents reign supreme over their small kingdom.

Beirut appears to have regained some of its colors. Tourists and passersby are bustling about. But almost everyone is unaware of what lies behind the large Ottoman-style gate.

The City Hall Palace stands silently amidst the commotion, a forgotten prop in a cardboard set that no one bothers to notice anymore.

Yet, it represents a stark reality of a national illness plaguing the country.

In Beirut, the city and state are intertwined, with laws and customs reflecting a long struggle for influence.

For the independent Lebanese executive, as well as the external powers that previously governed, controlling the territory required domesticating its center.

The baladiye was first established in 1863, following the Druze-Christian war of 1860, to manage the influx of refugees from Mount Lebanon.

Responsible for city life, particularly hygiene and public security, the Beirut Municipality quickly became a key actor in local affairs, embodying a certain degree of provincial autonomy in relation to the central power.

As the main intermediary between the Ottoman government and its subjects, the municipality carried the seeds of modern citizenship — a forgotten era when the idea of general interest guided public action despite foreign tutelage.

A century and a half later, the municipality is nothing like it used to be. Perceived as a threat, the baladiye was gradually stripped of its functions and transformed into a cash cow.

Today, the Municipality of Beirut is a microcosm of Lebanon’s dysfunctions. Its outdated system, confessionalism, corruption, administrative burdens and excessive privatization illustrate the absurdity of a phantom state where what little remains of public service is at risk of being swallowed up at any moment.

Special status

The municipality of Beirut is a somber place, with every detail betraying the gloomy atmosphere that pervades it.

In the aftermath of the 2020 Beirut port explosion, throughout the ongoing economic crisis and during the 2019 popular uprising, or thawra, the municipality has been in the front row of the country’s tragedies.

The empty corridors are a reminder that employees, paid in lira, only come to work two or three times a week. Piles of documents have turned yellow on desks. Computers are a rare sight.

A second-floor corridor is littered with cardboard boxes, garbage bags and torn curtains — the debris from the Aug. 4, 2020 port explosion that no one has bothered to remove.

Portraits of former President Michel Aoun have also been forgotten on the walls.

“I didn’t think to remove them, I didn’t expect the [presidential] vacancy to last so long,” Marwan Abboud, Beirut’s mohafez (governor), in office since 2020, says apologetically.

Here, he is the boss. He decides everything. From the funds allocated by the city to the days when the employees have to come to the office. Every authorization and every building permit needs his approval.

In Beirut, the local governance structure is particular: the authority of the mayor, who is an elected official, is subordinate to a state agent affiliated with the Interior Ministry — a phenomenon often referred to as the “two-headedness” of Beirut.

The executive branch within the municipality is entrusted to the mohafez, while the 24-member city council holds legislative power.

The council is headed by a president (the mayor, although the post holder does not formally hold the title) who has no means of implementing decisions adopted by the council without the governor’s approval.

This makes local governance in Beirut a global exception — a national aberration for those who see it as the root of all evil.

“By duplicating roles, a lot of energy and time is wasted,” says Mona Fawaz, a professor of urban studies at AUB and co-founder of the Beirut Urban Lab.

Abboud appears to be satisfied with his special status, a sentiment shared by his predecessors.

“Things are working in the best possible way,” he says. “Other municipalities should follow our model.”

However, the structure — a legacy of the Ottoman period and the mandate system that was restored by the May 1963 law — was intended to provide a system of checks and balances to avoid the concentration of power in the hands of a single person.

But is this truly a guarantee of democratic balance? Jamal Itani, 60, the current head of the city council is unconvinced.

“Beirut will never be able to function properly with such an outdated and counterproductive system,” says Itani, who has been in his post since the May 2016 election, the most recent one to date.

The management of the capital is often hampered by disputes between the different poles of authority, which are fueled by ego clashes and communal overtones.

“The relations between the city council and the governor are not regulated by law. The mohafez has no legal obligation to carry out the council’s approved project, or even respond to them,” Itani explains.

He added that he will step down at the end of May when his term ends, whether or not elections are held.

The power struggle [between the governor and the city council] often results in a standstill, causing numerous projects to be abandoned despite the investment of millions of dollars.

“Thousands of files have been sitting in drawers for years,” says Bilal Hamad, who served as president of the Beirut City Council from 2010 to 2016.

Exchanges can sometimes turn into a farce, with a “testosterone-fueled” atmosphere exacerbating the situation. For instance, a former mohafez once ignored a letter from the council president because the letterhead on the paper did not match the official title of the position.

“Next time, don’t mention that you are a mayor. There is no mayor in Beirut,” Abboud retorted.

‘A little push’

The matter would have been settled if it were not for the sectarian aspect that characterizes many Lebanese institutions.

Despite the official non-sectarian nature of the law governing municipal elections — i.e., the 1947 law, reaffirmed by the 1977 law — communalism still plagues the municipality, and key positions are allocated according to religious criteria.

Since Lebanon’s independence, the city governor is traditionally a Christian, typically a Greek Orthodox, while the head of the municipality is a Sunni from a local family.

Since the 1990s, the Hariri family, both father and son, have ensured equal representation between Christians and Muslims in the municipal council through their patronage.

Then, as now, the battle for Beirut was fought along confessional lines.

With Saad Hariri’s withdrawal from politics in January 2022 interpreted as a threat to the traditional balance in place at the municipal level, some stakeholders have called for an overhaul of the election law.

This is the case of several Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) MPs, who in July 2022, tabled a bill providing for dividing the capital into two municipalities, one with a Christian majority, and the other with a Muslim majority (Beirut I and II).

“In addition to the fact that we are attached to the confessional value, parity is a general principle that still has the support of most political blocs,” says FPM MP Nicolas Sehnaoui, who is campaigning for equal representation to be protected by law.

While politicians are lost in endless sectarian debates, on the ground, city departments continue their slow descent into hell.

Like everywhere else in the country, the financial crisis has created new challenges for the administration of Beirut. The decline in revenue from local taxes collected in Lebanese lira (such as building permits, business licenses and housing taxes) has severely limited the municipality’s ability to act.

Until recently, the municipality had access to hundreds of millions of dollars, making it the wealthiest in the country. However, the depreciation of the national currency has significantly eroded its bank reserves.

The municipality’s partnership with the private sector, which previously facilitated the outsourcing of the vast majority of its services, has also been disrupted by payment difficulties. As contracts are offered in Lebanese lira, they are no longer attractive to companies that prefer foreign currency offers.

“There is a significant gap between the time a company wins a tender and the actual execution of the project, which can take up to five or six months,” a former elected representative told L’Orient-Le Jour on condition of anonymity. “Unfortunately, due to the lengthy administrative delays, the contract quickly loses its value.”

Many projects have been put on hold because service providers’ contracts have not been renewed. One example is the Sioufi garden in Achrafieh, which has suffered a rapid decline. Development work had begun in 2018 but was halted in late 2019, shortly after the outbreak of the financial crisis and the Oct. 17 uprising. Since then, the park has remained as is, much like the country itself, suspended in an aftermath that never seems to end.

For the municipality’s 1,200 or so employees, ensuring the continuity of municipal services has become a real struggle.

“It’s all pain,” says one member of the municipal guard. A few have managed to keep their heads above water.

Gabrielle*, 36, has been working in the public engineering department for twelve years.

She, along with her five colleagues, is responsible for managing requests such as consulting real estate records, applying for building permits and obtaining permission to demolish an existing building.

Since the crisis began, Gabrielle only goes to her office on Corniche al-Nahr two or three mornings a week.

Although her salary has tripled in Lebanese lira, as per a government decision, she still could not survive solely on that income. To keep a job she loves, Gabrielle gives private lessons every afternoon. As she puts it, “It’s a little extra push. I could have left — left Lebanon.”

Despite the many challenges, Gabrielle is one of the few who still believe in the possibility of public service. For her, staying in Lebanon has become a matter of principle.

“To people who ask me why I’m still here, I say: you don’t turn your back at the first hurdle, some crises have to be overcome,” she says.

‘The NGO republic’

Of these efforts, Beirut residents only see fragmented improvements. The municipality has become a ghostly presence, with little impact on the daily lives of city dwellers. Due to the reduction in staff, everything operates in slow motion.

“We always hear the same story … Later, later,” one resident told L’Orient-Le Jour.

Nowadays, externally funded organizations provide basic services such as lighting and traffic lights on the streets of the capital.

Inside the municipal palace, people wait in the governor’s office lounge for their turn.

“We’ve lit up four roads, but we still have three more to go,” says an NGO worker, seemingly waiting to report back.

The city’s governor takes pride in his role as the coordinator of all operations, referring to himself as the “conductor of the orchestra.”

“I decide who can work where and how. I am the director of the play, they are the actors. They play the role I agree to give them,” he boasts.

However, some observers are displeased by the rise of the “republic of NGOs,” as they see it as a recipe for disaster.

“From Haiti to Iraq and Afghanistan, we know that no formula for replacing the state with non-governmental organizations works in the long term,” Fawaz says.

The economic and financial crisis that has taken place in recent years, though undoubtedly difficult, cannot solely account for the current situation.

The city’s development and demographic changes had already created a gap between the urban reality and the municipality’s administrative boundaries.

The municipality “no longer represents anyone,” according to Fawaz.

The political marginalization of the municipality began before the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90). In 1963, the central government adopted a series of measures that gradually marginalized local governance bodies. The establishment of the Executive Council for Major Projects in the City of Beirut (ECMPAB) was the first step toward undercutting the institution’s authority.

“They began to strip it of its attributes and competencies,” explains historian Carla Eddé.

From 1977 onwards, the Council for Development and Reconstruction (CDR), whose role was consolidated after the war, became the primary project manager in the capital.

The local institution lost one of its main prerogatives: urban planning.

​​In the 1920s, an ambitious policy of major works resulted in the creation of the new souks, Nejmeh Square and the corniche. However, today, urban projects are often carried out without the municipality being involved in the decision-making process, or its involvement is merely for form’s sake.

Between the 1990s and 2000s, the reconstruction of downtown Beirut was overseen by the central government, which delegated the implementation to private entities (Solidere).

Unloved by all, the baladiye became an atrophied, foreign body within Weygand Street.

It serves as a money-making machine, redirecting taxpayers’ funds to private companies that it subcontracts to participate in the city’s life.

Internally, an institutional culture that caters to private interest, has started to take root.

“The municipality is partisan, and projects are completed based on the desires of certain social or political groups through lobbying,” explains Leon Telvizian, who ran as a candidate for Beirut Madinati in the 2016 municipal elections and is a professor at the Lebanese University, as well as co-founder of the Department of Urban Studies.

Corruption, impunity and a culture of favoritism and cronyism are entrenched in the municipality’s daily routine.

Administrative delays and complex procedures are also pervasive.

“Coming from the private sector, where decisions are executed efficiently, I found myself confronting a new routine that I was not accustomed to,” says Roula Ajouz Sidani, the first woman elected to the city council (1998-2004).

Occasionally, individual initiatives manage to introduce a hint of modernity into the anachronistic setting of the municipal corridors, such as the implementation of a computer system or the digitization of archives. However, such efforts invariably encounter the rigidity of the system.

“After six years in the municipality, I have learned one thing — reform is not possible. If we wish to establish a state, we must dismantle everything that exists and rebuild on new foundations,” says Ziad Chebib, governor from 2014 to 2020.

Sources :

Carla Eddé, « Beyrouth, naissance d’une capitale, 1918-1924 », Actes Sud, 2010.

Jens Hanssen, « Fin de Siècle Beirut – The Making of an Ottoman Provincial Capital », Oxford, 2005.

Melanie S. Tanielian, « Feeding the City: The Beirut Municipality and Civilian Provisioning During World War I » (« International Journal of Middle East Studies », 2014).

*The name has been changed 

This article was originally published in French in L'Orient-Le Jour. Translation by Sahar Ghoussoub.