WOMEN marched on the scene of last year’s devastating explosion in Beirut on the eve of Lebanon’s Mother’s Day on Saturday night.

The demonstration included mothers of victims of the August 4 blast, when 3,000 tons of ammonium nitrate fertiliser that had been unsafely stored for six years in a warehouse ignited, killing 211 people and injuring more than 6,000.

Banners called on the political elite to surrender power. “The scream of every mother is ‘leave’,” one read. Another was inscribed: “We raised them inch by inch and you blew them up. Leave.”

Lebanon is mired in an economic and political crisis, with galloping inflation and no sitting government. 

President Michael Aoun is scheduled to meet prime minister designate Saad al-Hariri this week to agree on forming a cabinet, and Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said the powerful Shi’ite militia would be prepared to support a government of technocrats, though it would prefer a role for politicians.

But he warned that Mr Hariri’s determination to access International Monetary Fund cash would entail submitting to demands that could intensify the crisis, such as removing food subsidies.

The Communist Party of Lebanon said no government cobbled together by the usual sectarian power-brokers — Lebanon’s political system is based on a division of key posts between leaders of the Shi’ite, Sunni and Maronite Christian communities — had any answer to the country’s problems.

General secretary Hanna Gharib called for protesters to “escalate the uprising in all regions, cities and rural areas” to bring down sectarianism and establish a secular democratic republic.

“Bring down the system of corruption and dependency and subject it to popular trial instead of calling for it to form a new government,” he said.