Democracy, Populism, & Domestic Politics A global take on Lebanon protests

During the last two months, hundreds of thousands of protesters have poured into the streets of Lebanon, decrying what they say is a corrupt system that benefits the political elite but fails to provide basic services or stabilize the economy. Penn Today spoke to two experts on Lebanon, Marwan Kraidy, director of the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, and Lama Mourad, a postdoctoral fellow at Perry World House, to get their take on what sparked the protests, what the marchers seek, and what it means for the country and the region.

Kraidy is an expert in global communication and a specialist in Arab media and politics. Mourad specializes in comparative politics and the politics of migration, with a focus on the Middle East.

Q: What spurred these protests?

Kraidy: The apparent trigger was the telecommunications minister saying they were going to tax WhatsApp calls, but something like that alone wouldn’t cause such massive and enduring protests. There was always political corruption in Lebanon, but there was a scaling up of corruption in the post-war period and with the Hariri family coming into power.

It really has to do with a buildup of one thing after another in the past few years. About five years ago Lebanon had a major garbage crisis. Soon after came issues of traffic jams and flooding. People begin to connect the dots that all of it was due to corruption. Politicians are fighting like the Mafia about who is going to get the biggest commission. When you hire a contractor who is beholden to a politician, most of the contract goes to bribes. What actually gets executed on the ground is below quality, doesn’t meet the basic standards, and just doesn’t work.

All these ‘bread and butter’ issues illustrated the actual impact of corruption and mismanagement on people’s daily lives. It was no longer an abstract notion of corruption that you could ignore, and people are very, very angry.

Mourad: The WhatsApp tax was part of a set of regressive taxes that focused on the lower middle class. Telecommunications costs in Lebanon are among the highest in the world because of the embeddedness and corruption of telecom with the state. About 84% of Lebanese use WhatsApp because it’s incredibly expensive to make phone calls. The outrage wasn’t about WhatsApp at all, it was actually about putting the burden of economic crisis on people who can least afford it.

But even more critical to the protests was a sudden outburst of wildfires in the weeks before the WhatsApp tax. The government showed shocking incompetence and mismanagement. They had firefighting helicopters but couldn’t use them because they hadn’t been repaired.

So, you had voluntary firefighting units from Palestinian refugee camps fight the fires, alongside the ill-equipped Lebanese firefighters. You had riot police trucks being used to fight the fires, highlighting the irony that the government had enough money to invest in the repressive apparatus of the state rather than in the public good.

As much as the fires showed the ineptitude and neglect of the government, they also showed the strength of citizen initiative. It gave people a sense of their own power and agency.

Read the full interview in Penn Today >>