Blinken calls Lebanon's failure to form government 'disappointing'

WASHINGTON - US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Lebanese politician Saad al-Hariri's announcement on Thursday that he had abandoned a months-long effort to form a new government was a "disappointing development."

"Leaders in Beirut must urgently put aside partisan differences and form a government that serves the Lebanese people," Blinken said in a statement. 

Lebanon’s Prime Minister-designate Hariri stepped down Thursday over what he called “key differences” with the president, deepening a political crisis that has left the Lebanese without a government for nine months even as they endure an unprecedented economic meltdown.

With no clear candidate to replace Hariri, Lebanon is likely to slide deeper into chaos and uncertainty. Prospects for forming a government to undertake desperately needed reforms and talks for a recovery package with the International Monetary Fund are now even more remote.

Poverty has soared in the past several months and dire shortages of medicines, fuel and electricity have marked what the World Bank describes as one of the world’s worst economic crisis of the past 150 years.

“I have excused myself from forming the government,” Hariri said after a 20-minute meeting with President Michel Aoun. “May God help the country."

Later, Hariri — one of Lebanon’s most prominent Sunni Muslim leaders — told Al-Jadeed TV that he has no intention of endorsing a replacement. According to Lebanon’s sectarian-based political system, the prime minister is picked from the ranks of Sunnis.

Without Hariri's backing, prospects of forming a government would become even more remote. Aoun said he would soon set a date for consultations with parliamentary blocs on naming a new prime minister-designate.

The national currency, in free fall since the crisis erupted in late 2019, plunged to a new low, selling for more than 20,000 to the dollar on the black market. The Lebanese pound, pegged to the dollar for 30 years, has lost more than 90% of its value.

France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, whose country ruled Lebanon for about 25 years until its independence after World War II, called the failure to form a new government “yet another terrible incident” demonstrating “the inability of the Lebanese leaders to find a solution to the crisis that they have generated.”

“They totally failed to acknowledge the political and economic situation of their country,” he told reporters at U.N. headquarters in New York after chairing a Security Council meeting on Libya.

“We are a few days from the first anniversary of the blast in Beirut” at the port that killed and wounded thousands, Le Drian said. “It is somehow cynical destruction of the country that is ongoing, and this is just yet another step."