Editorial of the “World”. The withdrawal of Saad Hariri from Lebanese political life, announced Monday, January 24, is the epilogue of a family saga of more than thirty years. It also marks the end of a politico-economic project, Harirismo, which for a time, before disintegrating under its own weaknesses and the blows of its adversaries, brought an unexpected measure of stability to Lebanon and the Middle East.
The story begins with Rafic, the father, a small entrepreneur from Saïda, who made his fortune by building, in the 1970s and 1980s, the palaces of the Saudi highnesses. With his contacts in high places in the kingdom, his good relations also with Damascus, his thick check book and his ability to seize opportunities, the businessman imposed himself at the end of the civil war ( 1975-1990) as the great organizer of Lebanon’s recovery.
Three-time prime minister, head of the Beirut center reconstruction company, ambassador of a prosperous Lebanon reconciled with itself, Rafic Hariri seduces as much in Riyadh and Damascus as in Washington and Paris, where he becomes a close friend of Jacques Chirac. Clever, clientelist and inclusive at the same time, soluble in the Saudi-Syrian condominium that weighs on post-war Lebanon, he embodies a moderate Sunnism.
But Damascus takes umbrage at its international stature. Bashar Al-Assad suspects him of working behind the scenes to implement UN resolution 1559, calling for the withdrawal of Syrian forces from Lebanon and the disarmament of Hezbollah, the Shiite militia party in the pay of Iran. On February 14, 2005, Rafic Hariri perished in the explosion of a van trapped in the passage of his convoy.
The torch is passed to Saad, but the costume is too big. Lively and milk soup, the youngest son does not have the charisma or the ardor for work of the father. Above all, the geopolitical deal is getting more complicated. The anti-Assad uprising in 2011 tore the region between a pro-Tehran camp, supporting Damascus, and a pro-Riyadh bloc, hostile to the Syrian regime.
The legacy of Rafic Hariri
Taken in a pincer movement, anxious to avoid a return to civil war, the Hariri heir deals with Hezbollah. This accommodation policy gradually distanced him from the Saudi kingdom, godfather of Hariris. The final break came in 2017, with the incredible episode of the sequestration of “Sheikh Saad” in Riyadh.
Two years later, the economic crisis deals another very hard blow to Harirism. The massive indebtedness, the artifice of the indexation of the pound on the dollar, the surge of the banking sector put down what had made the success of the country fifteen years earlier. The Hariri house collapsed long before its administrator announced it. One could even say that the collapse dates back to the assassination of the founder, Rafic.
The Middle East still bears the scars of its disappearance. He never found that Sunni center of gravity that the Lebanese leader symbolized. The Saudi Crown Prince, Mohammed Ben Salman, a rising figure in the region, has squandered in calamitous or criminal initiatives, in particular the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, the credit that his reforms had initially earned him.
The peoples of the Middle East are still looking for a unifying figure, capable of counterbalancing Iranian intrigues, of opposing the sectarian discourse of the jihadists and of sketching out a democratic horizon. As the Hariri son fades away, the father’s legacy comes back to the fore.