The mandate of Lebanon’s Municipal and Mukhtar councils, originally elected in 2016, ended in May 2022, but elections were postponed due to financial, administrative, and security challenges. Successive legislative extensions allowed these councils to remain in office until no later than May 2025. Following a presidential vacancy of over two years, General Joseph Aoun was elected President on 9 January 2025, and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam formed a government on 8 February 2025. The new government committed to holding municipal and parliamentary elections on schedule to uphold democracy, ensure a peaceful transfer of power, and maintain impartiality and transparency in the electoral process.
On 24 March 2025, the Minister of Interior and Municipalities officially announced the call for elections, which were scheduled in four phases across different regions of Lebanon between 4 and 24 May. Despite ongoing conflict and security risks, particularly in southern regions, the elections proceeded successfully with extensive logistical and security arrangements to ensure a smooth, violence-free process. The elections engaged over 4 million registered voters to select representatives for 1,065 municipalities, including 12,849 municipal council members and 3,196 mukhtars, with a budget of approximately 19 million U.S. dollars. Around 31% of municipalities were uncontested, reflecting ongoing challenges in electoral participation in some areas.
The 2025 elections marked the first implementation of a law allowing married women to run in either their marital residence or original hometown, promoting women’s participation in public life. A total of 2,595 women ran as candidates, representing 12% of all candidates, and were elected in 640 municipalities, ensuring women’s representation in 60% of municipalities. For mukhtar positions, 263 women contested, with 77 elected as mukhtars and 303 securing council seats, representing modest gains in women’s participation in local governance.
To review lessons learned and improve future elections, the UNDP Lebanese Electoral Assistance and Parliament Support Project (LEAPS), funded by the European Union, convened a workshop on 25 June 2025. The workshop focused on enhancing transparency, efficiency, and inclusiveness, strengthening institutional capacities, and supporting the participation of women, youth, and people with disabilities. UNDP provided critical technical support, including procuring electoral materials, training polling staff, establishing an electronic candidate registration system, developing voter awareness campaigns, and managing a hotline for citizen inquiries.
Despite the overall success, several challenges emerged, highlighting areas for improvement. These included limited training for polling officials, difficulties in managing substitute staff and candidate agents, misuse of accreditation cards and media passes, insufficient coverage of awareness campaigns, staffing shortages due to the ongoing economic crisis, errors in voter rolls, reduced availability of polling centers, delayed inspection of facilities, technical limitations in monitoring married women’s dual candidacy, and unclear candidate education requirements. Additional violations reported by observers included the use of phones in voting booths, use of public property for campaigns, delays in opening polling stations, pressure on voters, prolonged suspension of voting, and voting with newly issued civil registry documents instead of official IDs.
The 2025 municipal and mukhtar elections in Lebanon demonstrated the resilience of state institutions under difficult conditions, while also revealing operational, logistical, and legal areas that require reform to strengthen transparency, inclusiveness, and electoral integrity in future processes.
