Thirty years after the end of the civil war, and five months after the blast that destroyed Beirut’s port, Lebanon has moved from a failed political system to a failed state. Christians are leading the exodus of the professional classes and young people to the US, France and Canada
One of the great pleasures of Christmas in Lebanon has always been the riot of festive lights and Nativity scenes, as homes and town halls competed to light up the nights of the east Mediterranean littoral where Christianity was born. When Christmas and Ramadan occasionally overlapped, in a nation of Christians, Sunni and Shia Muslims and Druze, decorative fervour was even more intense. Not any more.
A stricken Beirut is making a seasonal effort. But there is little money to import Christmas trees and even less electricity to light them. A country that has endured decades of war and invasion, uprisings and assassinations, air strikes and car bombs, is struggling to emerge from 2020 – the year from hell.
The country’s present troubles started in hope, with a huge, cross-confessional civic uprising, not just in the capital but across the country, demanding the departure of the entire political class of superannuated warlords and sectarian dynasts allied with oligarchs and bankers, who have looted the state and brought the Lebanon they purported to reconstruct after the 1975-90 civil war to ruin.