Calm prevails for second night in a row in Lebanon, a day after President Michel Aoun called for national unity following a night of violence in Beirut between supporters of rival sectarian political parties.
Lebanon maintains a fragile sectarian balance since its many religious sects fought a 1975-1990 civil war with factions often backed by regional rivals, and ended by signing Al-Ta'ef agreement which designed a political setup for the country.
A financial crisis that began late last year, due to decades-long corruption and misuse of public funds, is seen as the biggest threat to the country’s stability since the war. The country is almost witnessing the worst economic collapse in decades, as local currency has plunged in value, prices have soared, and tens of thousands have lost their jobs or seen their salaries slashed, along with the high rate of inflation, which made nearly half of the population below the poverty line— all compounded from mid-March by a coronavirus lockdown.
More than 35 percent of Lebanese are unemployed, while poverty has soared to over 45 percent of the population, according to official estimates.
This crisis has driven hundreds of thousands of Lebanese people to take to the streets since October 17 in protest against the performance of the political elite, whom they accuse of corruption and failure to manage successive crises.
“Our strength remains in our national unity...What happened last night is a warning bell,” Aoun’s office quoted him as saying on Twitter. “We must put our political disputes aside and hurry to work together to revive our country from the depth of the successive crises.”
On another hand, the International Crisis Group reported this morning that Lebanon needs urgent international assistance to break the cycle of the accelerated economic meltdown, to be accompanied by some necessary reforms, which observers think the authorities are still ignoring.
“Lebanon will need emergency external assistance to ward off the worst social consequences of the crisis,” the Brussels-based think tank wrote in a new report.
“The economic crisis is without precedent in the country’s history,” the ICG said.
In March, Lebanon defaulted on its external debt, for the first time in its history. At the end of April, the government approved an economic reform plan, on the basis of which Lebanon requested assistance from the International Monetary Fund. Officials from both sides have held successive meetings since last month.
The government has since adopted an economic recovery plan and entered talks with the International Monetary Fund, seeking to unlock billions of dollar in aid.
“Lebanon needs to urgently push ahead with the negotiations with the IMF, on which support from other sources also depends,” the ICG warned.
The country is seeking around $9 billion from the IMF, the finance minister has said, on top of another $11 billion in grants and loans pledged by international donors in 2018 but never released due to a lack of reform.
Meanwhile, “external donors may need to step up humanitarian assistance to help those Lebanese hardest hit by the crisis,” the ICG said.
In its report, the research center warned that future governments will have to implement significant reforms “to put the country’s fiscal and economic system back on a sound footing,” it said.
“Such structural change will have to put an end to the political model in which corrupt and self-serving cliques appropriate and redistribute state resources and public goods.”
The think tank said it was “highly questionable” whether the political elite would be able to oversee such a transition, describing it as tantamount to “pulling out the rug from under their own feet”.
“It is very hard to imagine that they will do so unless the Lebanese who have gone into the streets since October 2019 find ways to exert sustained pressure on the country’s political institutions,” it said.
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