Lebanon’s prime minister steps down in face of anti-government protests
BEIRUT — Prime Minister Saad Hariri of Lebanon offered his resignation Tuesday, bowing to a demand of the enormous anti-government protests that have consumed the country and suspended daily life for nearly two weeks.
“I’m at a dead end,” Hariri said in a televised speech. “Jobs come and go, but what’s important is the country,” he added, echoing the words of his father, Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister who was assassinated in 2005. “No one’s bigger than the nation.”
But there were no signs of softening from the protesters, whose signature chant — “All of them means all of them” — encapsulates their fury at the entire political class. They returned to the demonstrations and roadblocks Tuesday after the announcement, despite an attack on protesters earlier in the day.
Years of barely suppressed rage over Lebanon’s corruption, dysfunction and widening inequality detonated Oct. 17, when the government, frantic to come up with new revenue to head off the financial crisis, announced a tax on calls made over popular, free internetbased messaging services, including WhatsApp.
Over the next several days, protests mushroomed from dozens of people into the hundreds of thousands.
Banks, schools and some offices have been closed ever since as protesters have seized and blocked major roads, defying attempts by the Lebanese Army to reopen them.
Whoever succeeds Hariri will be hard-pressed to address the protesters’ ultimate target: Lebanon’s deadlocked, corrupt political system, under which leaders of the country’s 18 officially recognized religious groups divide power and state funds for themselves and their followers at the expense of the country as a whole.
A few hours before Hariri spoke, supporters of Hezbollah and the Amal Movement, two powerful Shiite Muslim political parties, charged peaceful protesters in downtown Beirut. It was unclear what provoked the fight.
It falls to President Michel Aoun and Parliament to settle on a new prime minister.