There has been no acceptable solution to any one of the many critical problems facing Lebanon today: from the crisis of Syrian refugees to the mishaps that peppered last May’s legislative elections and the eternal thorny issues of household waste, the degeneration of public service, the corruption endemic in the political class, the long-awaited structural reforms and the virtual absence of transparency in the exercise of power.
This would make you think that the country’s education has to be done all over again to provide instruction in tolerance to counter displays of xenophobia, and even racism; instruction in democracy and respect for the law; instruction in the basic principles of ecology and respect for the environment; instruction in the spirit of public service, which consists of knowing the difference between «serving others» and «self-serving»; and finally instruction in the sacrosanct concept of accountability, so that elected officials, who instinctively believe that they are above the law, are held accountable.
If public opinion in Lebanon is unable to get its voice across, it is simply because elected officials consider themselves untouchable by the very fact that they are almost sure to be re-elected in the next elections, whatever the blunders they may commit during their term of office.
This is a political class that almost in its entirety bands together in brazen complicity and is regularly re-elected amid the generalized lethargy of a population that has nothing but tradition to invoke.