Why Lebanese protesters are risking a return to the streets

Nisrine Hammoud, a veteran Lebanese protester, could not believe what she was seeing last week in her northern city of Tripoli.

Enraged anew at a swift economic collapse that deepened both their poverty and their hunger, fellow demonstrators broke the country’s COVID-19 curfew and took to the streets.

While the anger against a corrupt political elite and decades of sectarian rule that sparked hundreds of thousands of Lebanese to rise up last October have not disappeared, the government wasted little time citing the pandemic to dismantle remaining protest camps in late March.

But in recent weeks, the virus lockdown has triggered additional pain: massive job losses and a currency in free fall have wiped out savings, caused a dollar shortage and soaring prices, and sparked new levels of desperation.

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