If ever there was a moment for change in Lebanon, this must surely be it

Like a break in a merciless heatwave, the fall of Lebanon’s failed government has reduced by a few degrees the political temperature in the country’s towns and cities. One week after the enormous explosion that levelled much of Beirut, its rulers have rightly paid a price. The power of the street had exposed the fragility of Lebanese leaders. Impunity hadn’t won the day after all.

But what seemed like much needed relief is more likely to be the start of a familiar pattern; the same line up of ministers who quit in disgrace will now take on a caretaker role, while those who really control the country haggle over the next incarnation of a government that is likely to look very similar to the one that has just resigned.

Unless things change radically, and soon, Lebanon’s next government seems set to serve the same interests – primarily around a half dozen power brokers whose collective control runs the affairs of state, harnessing institutions, diverting state wealth and subverting any notion of representative democracy.

Oligarchs who have built fortunes in three deeply corrupt post-civil war decades are consolidated by around 200 establishment families. All get varying portions of the pie. The masses are left with crumbs. And, all the while, regional overlords watch on from the shadows.

If ever there was a moment to change things, the near destruction of a country’s capital city from profound incompetence and corruption must surely be it. Even the resigning prime minister, Hassan Diab, acknowledged the atrocity at Port Beirut stemmed largely from endemic graft that had allowed 2,750 tons of one of the world’s most lethal explosives to be stored at the entrance to the town for six years.

But as Diab promised to now “stand with the people”, battered, anguished and still furious Lebanese are once again coming to terms with the intractable challenges ahead; how can a system so rooted in silos of power be overhauled? How can non-state actors like Hezbollah be defanged and incorporated into whatever kind of state emerges? How does a rentier state become self sufficient? How can subjects become citizens in a country that can credibly claim to be sovereign?

The list of obstacles is enormous, and has been well beyond the capacity of the five cabinets (including Diab’s) to quit since former civil war general Michel Aoun became President in 2016. The agreement he brokered to bring Hezbollah into the government was a turning point in Lebanese history - at least in the eyes of the militant group’s foes who turned their back as a result, just as it was becoming clear the country’s finances were being run like a ponzi scheme.

Even in the face of economic – and now physical – ruin, Hezbollah retains a decisive voice in what comes next, a fact that those who may otherwise be inclined to help Lebanon continue to find abhorrent. With no aid dollars, except for money sent to fund a recovery from the explosion, the country cannot stand on its feet again. Financial engineering, appealing to the diaspora, or pleading to the Gulf states no longer works – especially with the country’s catastrophic failings so gapingly laid bare in Beirut’s smouldering ruins.

Attention is now being focused on the dysfunctional parliament, where process is cosmetic at best, but better described as redundant. A clean sweep of the country’s MPs and a new electoral law that governs how the next round are chosen is being touted as a chance to do things differently. For that to happen, 43 MPs would need to quit. Eight have done so, so far, and more will follow.

A critical mass of resignations would pave the way for new blood, who may be emboldened to take on an old guard, which shows no signs of going anywhere – even now. Losing control is inconceivable to the men who run Lebanon, as the IMF has found out during three months of talks to try and find a way to hand over up to $5 billion in aid, by conditioning it on structural reforms.

Every attempt has been rebuffed. In the meantime, Lebanon had been savaged by rising prices, increasing poverty, a plunging currency, and capital controls. And now an apocalyptic blast. If this isn’t the time to overhaul a failed state, it’s hard to see when could be.