LEBANON Lebanese Christians, the balance of power and the war of numbers over the exodus

Outgoing Prime Minister Mikati is expected to meet Pope Francis at the Vatican this March. Today the emigration of young people is “80% Muslim.” The last national census dates from 1932 and is already outdated. The war of numbers for a representativeness that long ago exceeded the Islamic-Christian balance.

Beirut () – What is the percentage of Lebanese Christians in relation to the total population of Lebanon? Are they only 19.2%, as the outgoing Prime Minister Nagib Mikati recently stated during an interview on local television? Are they 34.42% as corrected by a source close to the Maronite patriarchate? Or maybe 42%, as Boutros Labaki, a renowned economist and statistician, along with other experts, claims?

The debate on this issue, which is a sensitive issue, was raised by Mikati, who advanced the figure of 19.2% for the Christian population, and no one has been able to verify it to establish its source or credibility. The spokesman Farès Gemayel clarified that the prime minister “does not want to reveal the names of the authors of the report that provides this information.” At the same time, Mikati added that he was concerned because this figure reveals a drop in the number of Christians in Lebanon and at the same time a more general phenomenon that affects not only the country of cedars but the entire Arab world. This is one of the topics that he wants to discuss with Pope Francis during his visit to the Vatican that should take place at the end of the month, although there is still no official date.

Unsurprisingly, Mikati’s announcement has caused a fracture in public opinion and among the Lebanese leadership. The Maronite patriarchate corrected it immediately, specifying that in the last general elections (May 2022), the Christian electorate of the lists – which included all the confessions present in the country – constituted 34.42% of the total voters, compared to to 65.5% of the Muslim and Druze communities. In the absence of a census with all the requisites, the use of electoral lists remains the best method to assess the total number of Lebanese and their distribution in confessional terms. All of this, always bearing in mind that this figure is still approximate in the absence of an effective process of digitalization and updating of the Civil Registry data.

Despite the alarming figures presented hastily and with some improvisation before the cameras, there are those who opt for a more balanced and rational approach. Boutros Labaki, economist and university professor -former vice president of the Council for Development and Reconstruction- along with other experts, assures that the Mikati data is just “a media operation”. On the contrary, the professor considers that “the demographic imbalance between Christians and Muslims is decreasing” and at this moment Christians represent almost 43% of the total resident population. To get a clearer idea, we must remember here that the Christian and Muslim populations were equivalent in the middle of the last century.

The economist explains that currently the emigration of young Lebanese is “80% Muslim.” Based on a study dating from 2012, Labaky argues that this phenomenon “has been going on for at least twenty years” and has different causes: the increase in levels of education and foreign language proficiency in Muslim communities; the development of networks in countries of emigration (bringing together immigrants from the same village in the same country of emigration); and the development of communications.

In addition, adds the economist, there are other factors that have weighed on the process of accelerating emigration. Among them he cites the Israeli threat to the inhabitants of southern Lebanon, the fight against illegal crops in the Bekaa and the war in Syria in the north. However, if in the midst of the presidential crisis the question of the respective demographic weight of the Lebanese communities is raised again, it means that it still remains unanswered, in a country whose institutions are based on a distribution of the highest institutional positions between the various components. And where, evidently, the numerical relationship between Christians and Muslims constitutes a “state secret”. All this, knowing full well that the last national census in Lebanon dates back to… 1932.