Feltman: Intentions and implementation may diverge significantly in Lebanon’s latest reform-for-support plan

Former US ambassador to Lebanon Jeffrey Feltman said that the emergency rescue program revealed by Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab on April 30 “purports to address comprehensively Lebanon’s economic collapse.”

“While tabled in more desperate times made even worse by the impact of the coronavirus, the program dusts off the essential deal of earlier Lebanese attempts to attract external support: Lebanon would enact extensive internal reforms and fight corruption, and outside actors would in response open the financial spigots,” Feltman said in an article published on Brookings.edu website.

He also noted that what “distinguishes this plan from previous reform pitches is the fact that this government rests on the support of only one side of Lebanon’s political spectrum — Hezbollah and its allies.”

“Previous proposed support packages for Lebanon were implicitly (and often not-so-implicitly) designed to strengthen the legitimate state institutions relative to non-state actors, especially Hezbollah. As this government relies exclusively on Hezbollah and its allies for its parliamentary support, that traditional justification for external assistance no longer works. The challenge for Diab will be to persuade donors that this plan does not solidify Hezbollah’s dominance in an increasingly fractured and dysfunctional, if not non-existent, state,” he went on by saying.

Feltman concluded by saying that “one fears that, in a déjà vu sense, this reform plan will face one of two unpalatable fates: Either it, like its many predecessors in Lebanon, will never be implemented, or — given the unprecedented dominance of Hezbollah and its allies — it will be implemented in a distorted, partisan way, even if that is not what Diab and his ministers intend. In either case, any interest by outside donors to help evaporates.”