Normality

Things are back to normal after the Doha accord. It means that opposition and loyalists are no longer opposition and loyalists; they are back to their rightful places: that strange council of elders we like to call government. Of course the government is not yet formed; however, it is only a matter of agreeing on how to share the spoils after three years of symbolic disagreement. Things are back to normal, namely to that everlasting state of waiting for another “symbolic disagreement” that will end by yet another agreement on redistributing the spoils among the same forces. After all, economy, the Lebanese politicians keep repeating in one of the most paradoxical and absurd formulas, must not be politicized. Politics in Lebanon are a field of its own.

The opposition has failed, even though it likes to portray its misadventure as a great victory. It has failed both its public and its chances to impose a real change, in other words to act as a real opposition. No economical reforms, no structural changes in the decayed political system canonized by the infamous Taef accords and a step back in the electoral law that will further divide the Lebanese sects.

The opposition has failed when it put aside all economical and political demands of social justice for the sake of a share in the government. The Hezbollah even confirmed the possibility of reattempting to reconcile resistance and reconstruction, as if 18 years of attempts have not proven the impossibility of achieving this symbiosis when reconstruction means fierce neo-liberal economy and resistance means disregard to economy.

Things are back to normal. Sanioura is again the democratically elected Prime Minister and the wonder boy of economical solutions with a record high of more than 42 billion dollars debts and a rapidly failing economy. Nonetheless, he insists on his right to appoint the minister of economy and finance. After all it is the share of the Sunnis as many keep repeating explicitly, as if in the opening verses of the Koran God clearly dictates that the economy should not fall into Fitna and that the faithful must always have faith in the fierce neo-liberal model.

Hezbollah’s public, formed mostly by lower and middle classes, will have to choose between resistance and social justice. It seems that the party is able to defeat the Israeli army but not the wonder boy of economy Fouad Sanioura and his twisted sense of economical prosperity. The public of the resistance will now have to choose. One can no longer be a leftist supporting the resistance of the Hezbollah, and expecting them to act as a real resistance, as a real liberation movement and include economy in their strategies of resistance.

Once the opposition leaves aside economical demands that seem far more pressing than the defense strategy, it will no longer be a force of change as it is trying to portray itself. In fact it will be restaging what the “14 of March” had done with their “Cedar revolution” and the “second independence” that achieved the highest degree of foreign interference in a country that has no frame of reference apart from those of regional and world powers. In fact the second independence led to a strange phenomenon whereas President, Government, Prime Minister, and electoral law were all appointed, agreed upon, and imposed by a constellation of States in Doha.

The Hezbollah must realize that resistance is not achieved merely with guns and highly effective military strategies. Resistance, which the party keeps trying to portray as a whole culture, does not consist merely in fighting an external enemy on the field and on the screen. Resistance must achieve liberation; it must build an infrastructure capable of developing and imposing a new model of prosperity. This infrastructure is not military it is social and economical. The resistance cannot cohabitate with the “reconstruction” (another word for Rafik Hariri’s and Sanioura’s failed economical plan of radical liberal economy that led Lebanon to its present economical crisis and destroyed the Lebanese middle and lower classes) contrary to what the Secretary General of Hezbollah said in his last speech. Resistance can only cohabitate with a sane economical system of social and economical justice focused on enabling the lower and middle classes by providing social welfare, a reasonable taxation policy, productive State control of certain layers of the economy, sustainable investments, and a severe anti-corruption policy. If the Hezbollah are serious in their preaching of a new model of resistance then they must reassess their position and look towards the left rather than the right for their safety.

For now the Lebanese sects are back to their respective positions, everyone is suspicious of everyone else, and the secular left is attempting as it always did to prove to itself that it is a force that can make a change. Things are back to normal in Lebanon and the summer will welcome a record number of Lebanese immigrants, the pride of a nation that cannot provide for its own citizens.