What Happens When Lebanon’s Nabih Berri Dies?

Too often, U.S. policy errs by assuming the permeance of the status quo. Mahmoud Abbas, for example, the 90-year-old president of the Palestinian Authority, currently serves out the 21^st year of his four-year presidential term with successive U.S. administrations treating him as an interlocutor with little attention to what comes next. In Lebanon, leadership is more diffuse due to its confessional system, with the president a Maronite Christian, prime minister a Sunni, and speaker of parliament a Shi’i. For almost 34 years, the leader of the Amal movement has been Nabih Berri.

For U.S. ambassadors and secretaries of State, Berri has been a common interlocutor, a Shi’i with whom the United States could talk without speaking to Hezbollah, a designated terror group. While President Donald Trump said on June 3, 2026, that he had spoken to Hezbollah “for the first time ever,” Lebanese officials privately say he actually spoke to Amal, but confused the two movements.

That is understandable, as Amal and Hezbollah have worked in tandem since the end of their “war of the brothers” in 1990. Following the end of the civil war, Amal and Hezbollah divided their labor. Amal sanitized the political representation in parliament and with the speakership, while Hezbollah maintained its arms. In 1992, Hezbollah won a small number of seats in parliament but, until recently, this bloc was content to work through Berri. Today, Hezbollah and Amal each holds 13 of the Lebanese parliament’s 27 seats, with Jamil Al Sayyed, an independent once held but never charged in the assassination of Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, holding the final seat.

The parity Hezbollah has in parliament signals its willingness to subsume Amal’s role and raises questions about the traditional division upon which Amal’s relevance rested. Today, Amal banners fly next to Hezbollah flags in Dahiya, the southern Beirut suburb that is Hezbollah’s chief urban headquarters, and Amal publicly endorses nearly every Hezbollah action. The same holds true in Amal’s traditional southern Lebanon Nabatiyeh stronghold.

Berri’s death may be the nail in the coffin of the Amal movement, or at least its relevance in Lebanese politics. Within Amal, there is no clear successor. Berri has three sons, two by his first wife Lila and one by his current wife Randa. Upon his death, Lebanese should expect conflict between Abdullah, the eldest son who believes inheriting his father’s mantle is his birthright, and Bassil, son by Randa. Randa, the titular head of various charities but whom Lebanese describe as the most corrupt person in Lebanon and the protector of the Berri family fortune, will side with her own flesh-and-blood over a stepson.

Nor are the two Berris necessarily the only competitors. There are rumors that Jamil Al Sayyed seeks the position, though his blunt outspokenness might make winning support from Amal’s own members difficult. Berri’s right-hand man, Ali Hassan Khalil, a minister of finance between 2014 and 2020, also may aspire to the post. The problem, at least from Washington’s perspective, is that the U.S. government views him as deeply corrupt, even by Lebanese standards. On September 8, 2020, the U.S. Department of the Treasury sanctioned Khalil for corruption and complicity in channeling funds to Hezbollah, further highlighting the symbiotic relationship between the two groups.

This leaves current Finance Minister Yassine Jaber, a former representative for Nabatiyeh in parliament. Jaber cuts a respectable figure in a business suit and would be more of a technocrat, but he lacks both the charisma and ruthlessness that Berri has had as Amal head and parliamentary speaker.

That Jaber or others might succeed Berri but be unable to fill Berri’s shoes raises questions for Amal—and for U.S. Lebanon policy, both today and in the post-Berri future.

The Amal-Hezbollah division of labor has precedent in the division between the Phalangists and Lebanese Forces. The Phalangists, represented today by the Kataeb Party, were long the political party representing Maronite Christians, while the Lebanese Forces were their militia to impose through force what the Phalangists could not achieve through elections. While that division was important and the Lebanese Forces disarmed in 1991, the bifurcation was never workable. In the most recent parliament, the Lebanese Forces held 18 seats to Kataeb’s four. Whatever force Kataeb had in the 1970s and early 1980s is long since gone; today, it is more a museum exhibit and a coffee klatsch than a movement capable of influence. After Berri dies, the same will likely occur with Amal. It will wither, with Hezbollah moving in to pick anything worthwhile from its carcass.

The fact that the State Department has always maintained the fiction that Berri was meaningfully different from Hezbollah betrayed both Lebanon and the United States. The betrayal of Lebanon was in his protection. Even those Lebanese who are fiercely anti-Hezbollah condemn Randa Berri and the failure of donor countries to act. She deserves designation by the U.S. Department of the Treasury as much as Khalil, but successive U.S. administrations demurred for fear of antagonizing Berri.

Meanwhile, maintaining the fiction that Berri was anything more than the consigliere to Hezbollah meant that Washington’s embargo on the designated terror group was less than complete. The Shi’i are too important a constituency to simply conflate them with Hezbollah. That said, ignoring the intra-Amal succession struggle could open the door for Hezbollah to absorb formally the institution. With the Lebanese government and Israel pushing further toward peace than at any time in more than four decades, it would be diplomatic malpractice for the State Department’s commitment to an untenable status quo to lead to a Hezbollah seizure of one of Lebanon’s three most important posts.

With Berri’s longevity likely measured on one hand, if not one finger, the time to start planning is now.