The birth of a new government in Lebanon is often greeted with ironic festivity. People pass around trays of baklava and bowls of meghle, a spice pudding served when a baby is born. For a week or so, respectable newspapers turn into society tabloids, which I pretend not to read. Who visited whom to offer congratulations on his new ministerial appointment? Which two former rivals had a “great lunch” and vowed to work together in the national interest? A few news cycles’ worth of political play-by-play dramatize the decisive moments of the negotiations, leaning hard on obstetric metaphors.
“The labor pains began on Wednesday night, but only a few of us knew about it,” one insider told me. “By Thursday, it was clear that the government was coming, but there were a few complications on Friday. Then everybody woke up on Saturday morning to a brand-new government.”
After they are appointed, the new Cabinet ministers gather in front of the Presidential palace to snap a commemorative photo. It’s customary for them to wear white suits for the occasion, as though they were welcoming us aboard the Love Boat. The sartorial symbolism has never been clear to me. “Are they supposed to look innocent?” I once asked my grandmother. “Like brides on their wedding day,” she replied.
This year, there were no white suits, and the festivities have felt, truth be told, a little forced. The government’s gestation period was long, even by local standards: the previous Cabinet dissolved in March, 2013, and it took eleven months to assemble another one—a new record. The country’s last elections were in 2009, but the winning alliance collapsed in 2011, and a coalition of opposition parties took control of the Parliament. In the meantime, it seems that many Lebanese have forgotten what it’s like to have a government: the country has spent more than a third of the past nine years without a functioning executive branch.
Those nine years mark the period since Syria’s Army left Lebanon, in April, 2005, ending three decades of military occupation and political suzerainty. With the departure of the Syrian Army, the country experienced a brief spell of independence fever, a mini-Arab Spring avant la lettre. Syria had been the great enforcer in Lebanon’s politics for so long that its retreat felt like the end of history. The humiliating scenes of Lebanese Prime Ministers and Presidents summoned to Damascus to receive their marching orders were things of the past—but so was a Pax Syriana, which had imposed a kind of order on Beirut politics and facilitated pesky processes like the formation of governments. What the last Syrian personnel carrier left behind when it rumbled across the border was a political stage more divided and intractable than Lebanon’s own fragile institutions were capable of directing.
This relationship between Syria and Lebanon—director and stage, doctor and patient—has been inverted during the past three years. Now Syria has become a pageant of violence, in which Lebanon’s Sunni and Shiite parties are playing leading roles.
Hezbollah, the dominant Shiite party in Lebanon, has sent hundreds, possibly thousands, of fighters across the border to defend its ally, the Assad regime, in what Hezbollah leaders describe as an “existential struggle” against Al Qaeda and other Sunni jihadist groups. The Future Movement, Lebanon’s largest Sunni party, headed by Saad Hariri—the son of the former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, whose assassination, in 2005, led to the expulsion of the Syrian military—has provided logistical support and funding, and perhaps also weapons and intelligence, to the Syrian rebels fighting Assad.
For the first time in its history, Lebanon has conducted its own wars on foreign soil, rather than playing host to the wars of its neighbors. Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, was the first to recognize this topsy-turvy reality when, in a May, 2013, speech, he invited his political opponents to “fight us in Syria” rather than bring the war to Lebanon. His opponents were not listening. Since that speech, tit-for-tat bombings targeting both Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods and towns in Lebanon have become routine. In response to its rival’s role in Syria, the Future Movement refused to join any government with Hezbollah—even if, as one of its representatives announced on a political talk show, it were headed by the Prophet Muhammad himself.
But, by late 2013, Syria’s war was becoming Lebanon’s as well, and the country was slipping out of the control of its Sunni and Shiite leaders. According to the political analyst Oussama Safa, both Hezbollah and the Future Movement had become frightened by the intensity of the sectarian animosity among their constituents. “The pressure in the Shiite community here is nerve-racking, and the Sunnis are boiling as well,” Safa told me. After struggling to contain the situation, Lebanon’s political leaders finally did what they had been refusing to do for nearly a year, and agreed to form a national unity government. The new Cabinet, which was announced on Saturday, has eight ministers representing Hezbollah and its allies; eight from the opposing bloc, led by the Future Movement; and eight unaffiliated “centrists,” including Prime Minister Tammam Salam.
Whether the overdue arrival of an ostensibly functional government has any effect on the violence spilling across the border remains to be seen. Nasrallah announced a few days ago that his party would not stop fighting against jihadists in Syria—a statement that was answered by two suicide bombings in a Shiite neighborhood of Beirut. But other observers are more optimistic about the outlook for the new Cabinet. “Since the Syrian crisis began, in 2011, Lebanon’s Sunnis and Shiites have been unable to speak to each other,” Alain Aoun, a member of the Lebanese Parliament, told me. “This government was the first sign, really, of Lebanon’s ability to distance itself from the Syrian war.”
The return to politics meant, among other things, a return to the byzantine processes of sectarian horse-trading that accompany any government formation in Lebanon. When I asked one political figure with inside knowledge of the negotiations why it took a month and a half to form the Cabinet, even after Hezbollah and the Future Movement agreed to share power, his reply was an exasperated one. “People underestimate how long it takes to reach these agreements,” he said. “The Interior Ministry took us a week to negotiate. Justice took us a week. Energy took a month.” He paused, and added, wearily, “It all takes time.”
Elias Muhanna is an assistant professor of comparative literature at Brown University.
Photograph by Wael Hamzeh/EPA.
