Lebanon establishment tasks Mustapha Adib with forming new gov't

About a dozen MPs either voted for no one or did not show up. Like his predecessor Hassan Diab, who was named by a narrower margin by the country's establishment following unprecedented anti-government protests that toppled a government last year, 48-year-old Adib is little-known to the public. He has been Lebanon's ambassador to Germany since 2013, has for two decades been an advisor to billionaire former prime minister Najib Mikati, and is seen as being close to the country's major parties. Monday's binding consultations between President Michel Aoun and MPs amounted to little more than a rubber stamp on a decision that had been hashed out among the country's sectarian leaders in the lead-up to French President Emmanuel Macron's second visit to Beirut in under a month. Macron arrives Monday night and has been in direct contact with Lebanese officials since his early August visit in the wake of a massive Beirut explosion that left at least 190 people dead and damaged large parts of the city. Macron has urged Lebanon's ossified politicians to come to a political understanding in order to pass through sweeping reforms and halt decades of corruption and mismanagement, which led the country into its deepest-ever economic crisis. Adib will now have to form a government that can push through long-overdue economic, financial and governance reforms in order to unlock international support for the crisis-hit nation, which was already collapsing before the explosion. The World Bank on Monday estimated the blast caused between $3.2bn and $4.6bn in physical damage,  mostly to the transport sector, housing and cultural sites, and incurred an additional $2.9bn to $3.2bn in losses to economic output. The organisation estimated Lebanon's immediate needs until the end of 2020 at between $605m and $760m, including for cash assistance, housing, and support for businesses. Western donors see a resumption of stalled negotiations with the International Monetary Fund, as well as reforms to the electricity and financial sectors, as key conditions for providing large-scale financial assistance.Adib's predecessor, Diab, was unable to push through reforms because of high-level political meddling that is common in Lebanon, a country where major decisions are traditionally made between the handful of ruling sectarian leaders rather than governments. "We know there are political forces behind these governments that don't necessarily align with the governments that they appoint, and that makes it difficult to have a programme and solutions to these complicated problems," Mike Azar, a senior financial advisor, told Al Jazeera.He noted Diab's government had faltered because it didn't have a clear plan for how to adress the country's challenges, and included a "hodge-podge of different people with different views," which led to chronic dysfunction. The country faces four key challenges: the recovery and reconstruction after the explosion, the criminal investigation into the explosion, the economic reform programme and financial restructuring, and the restructuring of the political system itself, which is root cause of most of Lebanon's current problems.