The year 2005 has been a turning point in the history of Lebanon. The assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in a car bomb on February 14th, 2005 triggered the largest demonstrations in the history of the country. Hundreds of thousands went to the streets to either denounce the Syrian regime and accuse it of being behind the assassination, or to flag out their alliance with it and accuse the US and Israel of killing Hariri. In the following research I study how the political protests that followed the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rafic Hariri turned into sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites. More precisely, I look at the fast shift in the political salience and the re-modelling of political, confessional as well as national identities. I analyze protest data (from newspaper archives and official data from Minitry of Interior) in order to depict the shift in political, as well as sectarian alliances. The empirical results show that the Hariri assassination was a “political earthquake” that shifted the attention of the Lebanese society from mainly pan-Arab concerns, to internal concerns and anti-Syrian activism. The analysis of our findings suggest that a change in political relations leads to sectarian tension when the majority of the sect follows one leader and when the two opposing communities are equal in size and in power.