“Sunni” voters in Beirut are on the decline: 21% of Lebanese Sunnis

Some media professionals and politicians believe that Lebanese Sunnis are concentrated in Beirut, but the reality is otherwise. The number of Sunni voters in Beirut is declining year after year, and only represented 21.6% of all Sunni voters in Lebanon in 2017. This ratio has declined according to electoral rolls, as shown in Table No.1.

Table No.1: Evolution of Sunni voter numbers in Beirut versus all of Lebanon (1996-2017).

Source: Electoral rolls (1996-2017).

If we exclude the voter figures from the 1992 electoral roll—the first roll to be adopted after the Lebanese civil war—due to the large number of errors and flaws it included, the figures indicate an increase in the number of Sunni voters in Lebanon during 1996-2017 by 502,375 (90.5%). The number of Sunni voters in Beirut has increased by 80,906 (54.7%) over the same period, and thus the percentage of Sunni voters in Beirut has dropped from 26.7% to 21.6%, an average annual decrease of 0.255 percentage points. If this trend continues, in 2024 the proportion of Sunni voters in Beirut will fall below 20% of the total Sunni voters in Lebanon.