Days of rage: millions of Lebanese take to the streets
Revolution is in the air in Lebanon, said Thomas Abgrall in Le Point (Paris). The economy is teetering on the edge of collapse; Prime Minister Saad Hariri has resigned; and over 13 consecutive days, hundreds of thousands of the country’s six million residents have taken to the streets in the biggest outpouring of public rage since the end of the civil war in 1990. The immediate flashpoint was the government’s imposition of new taxes, including a fee on free messaging services like WhatsApp, which many rely on to keep in touch with relatives abroad. In Beirut, furious demonstrators gathered in the city centre, denouncing politicians as “thieves”, blocking roads, erecting barricades, smashing windows and setting billboards ablaze. As anger spread, the government quickly backtracked, cancelling the new taxes and announcing reforms, including plans to raid bank profits and slash ministerial salaries. But it was too little, too late: last Tuesday, Hariri admitted he’d “reached a dead end” and said he was stepping down – a move greeted by cheers from protesters, who vowed to continue their campaign.
Young people are demanding an end to “corruption, nepotism, government mismanagement and, most of all, the sectarian political system that has allowed all these things to flourish”, said Rebecca Collard in Time (New York). The current system – based on the complex power-sharing arrangement that ended the country’s 15-year civil war – ensures that government and public sector jobs are divided up along religious lines: the president is always a Christian and the prime minister a Sunni Muslim, regardless of merit. It’s a “rotten” political set-up – but some observers fear Hariri’s resignation will only exacerbate tensions, said The Economist (London). Many blame Hezbollah – the powerful Shia militia-cum-political party allied to several senior politicians, including the “doddering” president, Michel Aoun – for aggravating the crisis. Just before Hariri resigned, Hezbollah “bully boys” clad in black stormed Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, chanting and beating protesters as police looked on.
The state is chaotic and “dysfunctional”, said Frédéric Pennel on Slate (Paris). Former warlords still hold sway in the country, hogging government contracts. There are frequent power cuts and “mountains” of garbage in the streets. When Lebanon’s famous cedar forests were devastated by fires during the summer, firefighting helicopters remained grounded because they hadn’t been maintained properly. At the same time, the country has one of the highest public debt levels in the world – and the civil war that has been raging since 2011 in neighbouring Syria has sent some 1.5 million refugees fleeing over the border. A country of 4.6 million at the conflict’s start, Lebanon now has the world’s highest number of refugees, per capita.
The country also remains deeply divided between rich and poor, said Jihad Bazzi on Al-Modon (Beirut). While one-third of Lebanese live below the poverty line, politicians – some of them billionaires or former warlords – speed around in black-tinted motorcades, and their cronies dine at five-star hotels. Ordinary people were “traumatised” to learn in September that Hariri – a 49-year-old father of three and a billionaire himself – had in 2013 gifted $16m to Candice van der Merwe, a South African swimwear model 23 years his junior with whom he was having an affair. As he was out of power at the time, he had broken no laws – but he’d shown no such generosity to workers laid off without pay when one of his companies went bankrupt recently.
Hariri’s resignation doesn’t mean he is “fully disengaging”, said Joe Macaron on Al Jazeera (Doha). It may be a tactical withdrawal, to deflect public anger, ahead of a renegotiation of the political status quo. The ball is now in the court of Aoun and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah. The most likely scenario is for the current cabinet to remain as a caretaker government. By playing a waiting game, the “oligarchy” will hope to pressure protesters to give up. But in doing so, they will be indefinitely extending the political and economic paralysis.