Will Macron Deliver on His Lofty Promises to Help Beirut?
France’s president has pledged to support the city through its crisis. But he doesn’t have the best track record in turning rhetoric into results.
Macron arrives in Beirut.
Source: Bloomberg
There were moments during Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Beirut on Thursday when it seemed that the French president was in a mosh pit, crowd-surfing over waves of adulation and anger: The adulation was for him, and far more than he might reasonably expect from a Parisian throng; the anger was for the entire Lebanese political class, who are being collectively blamed for the devastating blasts that shattered much of the city on Tuesday.
It is easy enough to cavil, as some have, that Macron’s walkabout in the Gemmayzeh neighborhood was political theater. He was always going to get a friendlier reception in a Francophile quarter of East Beirut than, say, in the southern suburbs controlled by Hezbollah.