Lebanon: "We are not close to having a new government in Beirut"

Text by: RFI Follow

4 min

Hassan Diab admitted on Monday that corruption had led to the tragedy of the port of Beirut last week. Her resignation, the future of Lebanon and Hezbollah, RFI interviewed Aurélie Daher, researcher and teacher at Paris-Dauphine and Science Po, author of the book "Hezbollah, mobilization and power".

Publicity

RFI: Hassan Diab is confessing, according to you, or is he trying to appease the street by taking up his main criticism, the corruption of the Lebanese political class?

Aurélie Daher  : No. What he does is he settles his accounts because there is one thing that we did not want to see in the West, is that we have lumped the government together and the political class. It is the political class and by that I mean the traditional community leaders, warlords inherited from the civil war, etc., who formed this government. However, what we did not want to see was that there had been water in the gas for a while between the government and the political class, especially around these "drafts" which did not exist. have not stopped going back and forth between the government the IMF (International Monetary Fund). The government, on several occasions, was close to reaching an agreement with the IMF and the political class, in cahoots with the banking system, categorically refusing to make too many concessions to the IMF, regularly sabotaged the work of the government. And then, recently, what we have seen is that there is pressure from the political class to make several members of the government resign. There was talk of putting the government in parliamentary session on Thursday. Hassan Diab understood that through this session, he was expected to drop. He just took the lead. He resigned on Monday and settled his accounts.

Now that the government has resigned, what are the scenarios you envision for Lebanon. We hear a lot of criticism, especially on Lebanese confessionalism. Are we nearing the end of a system that seems worn out today ?

Not at all, much to my regret. This is where we are heading. We had an extremely deep socio-economic crisis on our hands. We had a humanitarian catastrophe on Tuesday, August 4, now we will have a lasting political and institutional blockage. For a reason which is very simple, it is that already it will be necessary to find a “Prime Minister”. However, we have already seen what this resulted in last October, when Mr Hariri, who was Prime Minister, said that a successor had to be found. Constitutionally in Lebanon, the Prime Minister must be Sunni. However, all the first Sunni ministers at the moment are all part of the Hariri network, which is a network hated by the opposition. The opposition no longer wants to hear about it. So we will have to find someone who will be able to take the job. Then, we will have to find people who are at the same time competent, upright in their boots, and who would at the same time be approved by the political class which, for its part, only functions out of community patronage. Community balances will have to be preserved, that is to say that there should not be more ministers of such and such a denomination than of such other denomination. You imagine the Chinese puzzle. We are not close to having a new government in Beirut.

RFI: Regarding Hezbollah, the powerful pro-Iranian group. Will he try to recover from the crisis? What role can he play in the next few days, these coming weeks?

For now, there is one thing that Hezbollah cares about more than anything in domestic politics, and that is stability, and especially security stability. It is very important for Hezbollah that it does not degenerate on the ground. Moreover, there have been very clear echoes that come from Beirut and that say that Hezbollah is more in a logic of compromise. When there were discussions and Mr. Macron brought together all the community leaders, Hezbollah gave its approval to possibly the idea of ​​a government of national unity and leaving so that the IMF intervene. So, Hezbollah won't necessarily be the team's biggest troublemaker.

Newsletter Receive all international news directly in your mailbox

Follow all the international news by downloading the RFI application

• Lebanon