A police officer checks a car at a checkpoint during the coronavirus lockdown. (Marc Fayad)
Unless authorities decide otherwise, Lebanon’s coronavirus lockdown will end early Monday morning. A ministerial committee will convene today to discuss the lockdown, but a final decision may come later. Officials will need to weigh economic costs against public health gains — and the latter remain tenuous. New cases have fallen slightly, but local testing rates still indicate that the disease is spreading undetected. For the second time this week, the country saw a record number of deaths yesterday, with 24 people succumbing to the virus.
France is moving ahead with an international aid conference for Lebanon on Dec. 2, according to Reuters. The meeting comes as living conditions in Lebanon deteriorate amid inaction from the country’s political elite. A previous conference organized by Paris in April 2018 saw pledges of over $11 billion, but politicians failed to make any of the reforms required to get the money. At a snap conference after the Aug. 4 blast, countries pledged about $300 million, but it is unknown how much of that was actually delivered. The rest of French President Emmanuel Macron’s post-explosion efforts have crumbled.
As political paralysis deepens in Lebanon, Macron sent a letter of concern to his Lebanese counterpart. The message expressed the French president’s consternation over the current situation in Lebanon, calling on political leaders to set aside their personal, sectarian and factional interests. FPM chief Gebran Bassil, the Lebanese president’s son-in-law, sent a letter of his own to Macron in which he lamented the breakdown of Alvarez & Marsal’s forensic audit of the central bank. The consulting firm said yesterday that it had to terminate its contract “due to the insufficient provision of information” by Banque du Liban, according to Reuters. Bassil added in his letter that reform proposals by his party have been blocked in Parliament, without naming the political forces behind the alleged obstruction.
Parliament will meet today at 2 p.m. to discuss Michel Aoun’s letter requesting it to enable a forensic audit of the central bank and other state institutions. Sent on Tuesday, the president’s communique warned that Lebanon risks becoming a “rogue state” in the eyes of the international community due to failures to achieve reforms. Aoun sent the letter pursuant to his presidential prerogatives outlined in the Constitution’s Article 53, which permit him to address letters to Parliament.