13 September 2021 10:05
After 396 days, Lebanon has a government again. However, the country has now plunged into a crisis that is unprecedented in peacetime, and the agreement to form an executive built around the designated prime minister, Najib Mikati, does not necessarily mean the end of the hardships for the Lebanese people. Skepticism is a must.
Struck by a triple trauma – the economic and social meltdown, the political and structural impasse and the aftermath of the terrifying explosion in the port of Beirut on August 4, 2020 – Lebanon has made a descent into hell. Three quarters of the population now live below the poverty line. Everywhere there is a lack of electricity and fuel, while finding medicine has become an obstacle course. The exodus of those who have the opportunity to leave empties the country of its vital forces.
Najib Mikati, a Lebanese Sunni billionaire, has already been prime minister twice. Is he really the solution to get out of the crisis? Mikati will have to convince people that he is not the representative of yet another attempt to save a discredited system. Officially the ministers have no affiliation, but the composition of the government is the product of a balancing act of which Lebanon has always been a master.
The international community (and France in particular, on the occasion of Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Beirut last year) made the disbursement of the financial aid that Lebanon badly needs conditional on the formation of a government of experts. The objective was not achieved, also because all ministers actually have a political affiliation, mainly to prevent a faction from controlling more than a third of the components of the government and therefore having a right of veto.
The most positive reaction was that of French President Emmanuel Macron
This Lebanese political-sectarian disease, the target of the mass demonstrations of autumn 2019, therefore remains intact, even if it has become a little more discreet. Supporters of Christian President Michel Aoun, Sunnis and Druze and finally Shiites approved by Hezbollah and the Amal movement share their seats in the absence of the faction led by former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who has thrown in the towel.
The prime minister will have to announce his reform program to unlock the billions of dollars in international aid promised by the IMF, the Gulf countries and Lebanon’s friendly countries. And it is not certain that this procedure will be successful.
The most positive reaction was that of French President Emmanuel Macron, who complimented what he called an “indispensable step” while recalling the reforms needed to unblock aid. “Let’s deal with Lebanon for what it is”, they explain today at the Elysee palace, as if to apologize after Macron had expressed the (no doubt boundless) ambition to change the country.
Most Lebanese do not believe in any of this. Many are discouraged by what has happened in recent years, with the obvious impossibility of changing a system notoriously paralyzed by religious tensions. The first steps of the new ministers are certainly not encouraging. Social Affairs Minister Hector Hajjar has asked the Lebanese to deprive themselves of diapers, “like in China”, sparking a tornado of controversy on social networks.
“We are repainting the walls rather than rebuilding them,” Lebanese novelist Dominique Eddé recently wrote in Le Monde. We’ll see if this ploy will suffice once again.
(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)
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