An anti-government protester shouts slogans as Lebanese soldiers block a highway leading to the presidential palace in Beirut, on March 27, 2021. (MARWAN NAAMANI/PICTURE ALLIANCE VIA GETTY IMAGES)1111111111
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June/July 2021, pp. 61-62
Waging Peace
Amid Lebanon’s multiple crises, the Middle East Institute (MEI) held its first “Lebanon Policy Conference” on May 26. Among the topics discussed was whether there is any hope for positive political breakthroughs in the country.
MEI president Paul Salem noted that many of Lebanon’s economic and political issues can be traced back to the country’s entrenched and corrupt political elite. In the short term, he does not envision the country’s leaders taking serious measures toward reform.
“What they need to do on the policy front is so difficult and takes real courage and will be unpopular,” Salem noted. The political class doesn’t “want to make the actual decisions that need to be made because then they will have to bear responsibility. They don’t want to investigate the [port] blast, they don’t want to investigate the central bank…they don’t want to tackle the subsidies because they don’t want to take that responsibility, they don’t want to hold elections because it’s like going to your own execution. So maybe it’s not surprising that among those options, they choose to do very little.”
Salem believes elections scheduled for May 2022 are the best hope for change. However, he fears elections could be postponed if politicians sense voters are about to disrupt the status quo. “I’m afraid that the current prime minister [Hassan Diab], who is under the influence of the oligarchy—if they don’t want elections to happen, they will pressure him so that his government does not prepare for elections,” thus extending the mandate of the current parliament. Salem also doubts ongoing negotiations to create a government led by former Prime Minister Saad Hariri will ultimately succeed.
If elections do take place, the most likely and notable outcome would be “tremendous losses” for the Christian bloc aligned with President Michel Aoun and led by his son-in-law Gebran Bassil, Salem said. The Aoun-Bassil bloc is also aligned with Hezbollah in parliament. “What that means is that Hezbollah and its allies would no longer have an automatic majority, and that is a major political shift for Lebanon,” Salem noted.
Despite the many negative strains running through Lebanese politics, Salem does see slivers of hope. “This imbalance between where the oligarchy is and the people are will translate [into change],” he predicted. “I think this change needs to be measured over years, maybe half a decade or a decade, not over the next 12 months,” he added. “In the last 30 years, the Lebanese public went along with the oligarchy and they really were not politically mobilized. That has all changed.”
Maha Yahya, director of the Beirut-based Carnegie Middle East Center, shared Salem’s long-term hope. “What I find heartening is the energy I see across the board among civil society organizations [and] the emergence of multiple new political parties,” she said.
At the same time, Yahya acknowledged that the near-term is bleak. “The country is collapsing around us…and they [the political elite] are just operating business as usual—it’s astonishing,” she said. “The collapse doesn’t seem to have a bottom, but also the system is so congested and completely bottlenecked that there doesn’t seem to be a way out.” The Lebanese people, she added, “just don’t know which way to turn anymore.”
—Dale Sprusansky
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