The ‘streets’ of Lebanon have exploded in massive protests since October 17th. Following months of austerity and dire economic conditions, a shortage of US dollars that caused a serious threat of devaluation of the Lebanese currency resulting in a potential crisis of gasoline and bread, the continuing power and water outages, and a catastrophic week with wildfires ravaging the country and exposing the ruling class, the government met on Thursday and agreed to impose new taxes on the people, including a tax on Whatsapp calls! While the uprising is not merely caused by the Whatsapp tax specifically, the newly agreed upon taxes (later reversed following street pressure) were perceived by most Lebanese as a ‘vulgar’ reflection of the government’s total neglect of people’s hardship and its priority to protect the interests of the ruling upper class at the expense of the majority of the population.
Not completely unexpected, mass protests have ravaged the country. While Lebanon has witnessed in its recent history similar massive “street explosions” against the ruling class (such as in 2015), the Lebanese ‘October Revolution’ of 2019 marks an important turning point in the history of contentious politics in the post-civil war era. After almost three decades of neoliberal policies that resulted in the deepening of class divides, people have taken to the streets this time to clearly denounce the ruling class that stands as the guardian of neoliberalism (and its own class interests), beyond sectarian divides that are usually an effective tactic deployed by the leaders to divide the streets. This time, the revolution started with the poorer classes of unemployed or underemployed - usually the backbone and constituencies of the hegemonic sectarian parties through complex networks of clientelism – turning against their ‘patrons’.
Thousands of ‘motorcycle riders’ mobilized on Thursday evening, following the government’s decision to impose new taxes, to block roads with blazing tyres and paralyze movement in the capital Beirut. The road blockades quickly spread to other regions and people started to gather in squares and roads across the country in a show of anger that clearly targeted all the rulers – for the first time, without any exception. The initial mobilizations that took the shape of a riot have – maybe surprisingly for some – gathered hundreds of thousands around them. While the protests of 2015 were led by a group of civil society organizations mainly representing the middle classes and rejecting most signs of riot or civil disobedience under the banner of protecting the protests from “infiltrators”, the recent protests have started specifically with those usually (and wrongly in most cases) considered to be the “infiltrators” themselves.
