(Bloomberg Opinion) -- News that Lebanon may finally get a new prime minister, nearly two months after the last one quit, is unlikely to end demonstrations that have wracked the country for weeks. The protesters, who have remained in the streets since bringing down the previous government, have made it abundantly clear they want to see the back of the entire political elite. They will not be impressed by the nominee, former education minister Hassan Diab.
That Diab is backed by the two major Iran-backed Shiite factions, Hezbollah and Amal, will likely make him even less credible in the eyes of the protesters. Those two groups have in recent days been staging angry, raucous counter-protests, deliberately raising the specter of sectarian conflict in a country that bears the scars of previous such conflagrations.
Hezbollah, in particular, is desperate to protect the existing political order, one that maximizes its influence and minimizes its responsibility. No one stands to lose more from the sweeping reforms demanded by the protesters: a complete overhaul of the political system, undertaken by a government of unaffiliated technocrats.
This is anathema to Hezbollah and its allies, which have prospered from a political arrangement that apportions power along sectarian lines: the Maronite Christians have a lock on the presidency, the prime minister is always a Sunni, and the speaker of parliament is unfailingly Shiite. Any political reform that could change this cosy arrangement—and the rigid gerrymandering of parliament along communal lines—would threaten all sectarian parties. But Hezbollah is more likely than the others to resist such change with violence.
Hezbollah’s weapons, and its backing by Iran, allow it to blackmail the rest of the country. This sub-national and unaccountable group has its own independent foreign and defense policies. As long as that continues, the Lebanese state is fundamentally hollow and militants call the shots where and when they really want to.
Hezbollah and its allies—particularly President Michel Aoun and his much reviled son-in-law, Foreign Minister Gibran Basil—have rejected the protesters demands for a technocratic government of outsiders. In their desperation to preserve the old order, Aoun and Basin tried to persuade Hariri to stay on; he refused. They will likely throw their weight behind Diab. (The nominee doesn’t seem to have any backing from his fellow-Sunnis, which doesn’t help his credibility.)
And what if, as is likely, the new man is rejected by the protesters? It is conceivable Hezbollah will go back to the drawing board, and seek another compromise candidate who preserves the status quo.
But the portends from earlier this week are alarming. On Monday, groups of Hezbollah and Amal supporters rampaged in the streets of Beirut, attacking protesters and fighting with security forces. This continued unabated for three days. They were supposedly enraged by a video by an allegedly drunk Sunni man insulting Shiites, but this was plainly pretext; such insults are hardly uncommon, and the response was aimed directly at the protest movement that threatens Hezbollah’s interests.
The counter-protests suggest the political stalemate between the demonstrators and the most determined protectors of the sectarian order is coming to a head. Hezbollah’s message is clear: if it needs to use violence to prevent real reforms in Lebanon, it will.
For many Lebanese, this message is a frightening reminder of the 1975-1990 civil war. The non-sectarian nature of the current protests had revived the ideal of Lebanon as a modern national project that would eventually transcend communal and confessional disparities and suspicions. That vision was never fully realized, but nonetheless prevailed in the national discourse until it was crushed by the civil war and replaced with the rigid and corrupt sectarian order that the protesters are now challenging. But Hezbollah, formed after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, has no institutional memory of the pre-civil war Lebanon; it knows only the uneasy equilibrium of unstable forces that followed.
Nobody beholden to Hezbollah, as Diab will be, can be the agent of change Lebanon needs. The protesters know this, and will not stand down. Beirut must brace for more violence.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Bobby Ghosh at aghosh73@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington.
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