⁍ Lebanon’s prime minister-designate quit on Saturday after trying for almost a month to line up a non-partisan cabinet.

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⁍ Mustapha Adib was picked on Aug. 31 to form a cabinet after President Emmanuel Macron’s intervention secured a consensus on naming him in a country where power is shared out between Muslims and Christians.

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⁍ Under the French roadmap, the new government would take steps to tackle corruption and implement reforms needed to trigger billions of dollars of international aid to fix an economy that has been crushed by a mountain of debt.

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– The economic crisis in Lebanon is getting even worse. Prime Minister-designate Mustapha Adib announced his resignation on Saturday, Reuters reports. Adib was chosen by French President Emmanuel Macron on Aug. 31 to form a non-partisan cabinet that would address Lebanon’s economic crisis, which has seen the Lebanese pound depreciate from an official peg of 1,500 to the dollar since last year. The street value of the Lebanese pound, which has plunged from an official peg of 1,500 to the dollar since the economic crisis erupted last year, weakened further. A source close to Macron says the situation that led to Adib’s resignation amounted to ‘collective betrayal’ by political parties but said France, the former colonial power, would not abandon Lebanon. Under the French roadmap, the new government would take steps to tackle corruption and implement reforms needed to trigger billions of dollars of international aid to fix an economy that has been crushed by a mountain of debt. Lebanon faced a further knock when a huge explosion at Beirut port on Aug. 4 ruined a swathe of the capital. Adib—a Sunni Muslim, as the prime minister has to be under the sectarian power-sharing system—announced he was stepping down but said Lebanon must not abandon the French plan or squander Macron’s goodwill. “I stress that this initiative must continue,” he said after meeting President Michel Aoun, a Christian. He wished his successor well in the ‘hard task’ of forming a government. Politicians, whose loyalties tend to follow confessional lines, had promised Paris they would have a government in place by mid-September.