Hussein Yousef’s tanned face betrayed little emotion, but his eyes were pained as he leaned on the concrete barriers in central Beirut’s Riad al-Solh square.

The last time he saw his son, Mohammad, a Lebanese army soldier, was in a video 10 months ago in which an Islamic State militant was threatening to kill him. “The last time I heard his voice he told me, ‘Father, they will kill us if the state does not negotiate seriously for us.’ He was shaken and frightened,” said Yousef, his voice catching. “When I see my son like this, kidnapped, his hands tied behind his back, his eyes open, a knife near his throat that could in any moment sever his neck; that was the last horrible time I saw my son.”

Beside him was Marie Khoury, whose brother, George, is held by Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaida affiliate. Her eyes welled up as she told his story. “I took his [George’s] cap and I put it under my pillow,” she said. “Every night I go to sleep, he is there.”

The plight of the soldiers’ families, 25 of whom are still being held by the militants a year after they were captured during battles near the border, is just one particularly harrowing story that illustrates how the Lebanese government has repeatedly failed its own citizens.

Its inability to negotiate their release was just one milestone on the road that culminated in a crisis sparked by its failure to clear rubbish this summer and to negotiate a deal for a new landfill. Beirut residents are taking to the streets for the second time this month to rail against the incompetence of the government. As Khoury and Yousef spoke, nationalist songs blared from speakers in a square nearby. “Their cause,” said Khoury, “is my cause.”

For the Lebanese, the rubbish crisis – in which rubbish collectors stopped working, forcing residents to cover their faces to shield themselves from the stench – has been a profound indignity and a step too far for a government with a record of failure that would have been almost comical were it not so tragic. “It is an insult,” said one man. “I grew up without water and electricity. But trash?”

Basic services are a struggle for the Lebanese government to provide. There are three-hour rolling power cuts in Beirut, which are extended in the summer, with some of the poorer neighbourhoods going days without electricity, forcing people to sleep on bare tiles to cool off or under layers of blankets in the winter cold.

Water shortages still abound, an absurdity in a country with 16 rivers. Last year, private water companies prospered as they filled water tanks after a particularly dry winter led to severe shortages as early as May, depleting water reserves. About a third of that water was wasted because of ailing infrastructure, with bursting water pipes flooding streets whenever the government turned on the taps.

Even the country’s demographics have been profoundly changed – Lebanon now hosts more than a million Syrian refugees among a pre-war population of four million, the equivalent of the UK suddenly receiving an influx of 13 million refugees.

The government, characteristically, failed to build camps for the displaced, worried that they might offer a veneer of permanence that would upend Lebanon’s delicate sectarian balance. Many of the war’s refugees now live in abject misery, with their children reduced to begging or shining shoes in Beirut’s streets or toiling in the fields in the country’s agricultural hinterland.

Lebanon’s politics is deeply dysfunctional, with its leading politicians beholden to foreign interests, pawns in a regional tussle between Iran, which backs the country’s Shia and half of its Christians, and Saudi Arabia, which sponsors its Sunni leaders and their own Christian allies.

Rafiq Hariri’s murder plunged the country into crisis. His son now leads Lebanon’s main Sunni bloc. Photograph: Ramzi Haidar/AFP/Getty Images

The country has been without a president for more than a year. Its parliament usually elects the largely ceremonial head of state, a Christian, but has failed in about two dozen legislative sessions to even achieve the quorum necessary to put the candidates to a vote.

The leader of the Future Movement and the country’s main Sunni bloc, Saad Hariri, spends his time shuttling between Paris and Riyadh because of fears for his safety. His father, Rafik Hariri, one of the country’s most popular post-civil-war politicians, was assassinated in a massive car bomb in 2005 that plunged Lebanon into years of instability. An international tribunal in the Hague has indicted five members of Hezbollah in connection with the attack.

Critics say the country’s parliament has made a mockery of Lebanon’s claim to be a democracy, extending its own term twice and postponing elections, citing security concerns. Party leaders are slowly handing off power to their own progeny, scions of modern fiefdoms.

Then there is Hezbollah, the political and military organisation that, thanks to financial and military assistance from Iran, now boasts the most powerful guerrilla army in the world, with capabilities that rival nation states.

Hezbollah has vastly expanded since it fought Israel to a stalemate in 2006, a conflict that devastated Lebanon and was sparked by its kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. It took control of Beirut in 2008 by force, withdrawing only after the government rescinded an order to shut down its clandestine telecommunications network.

The party has forcefully intervened in the Syrian civil war alongside the country’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, even conducting siege warfare, its soldiers returning grizzled veterans from one of the most savage conflicts to grip the region.

While maintaining security on the border with Syria, the party has also reached out to assist allies of Iran in places as far flung as Iraq and Yemen. Just over a year ago, fighters pledging loyalty to Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra swept into a town on the border called Arsal, before withdrawing with dozens of captives, some of whom have been executed as the Lebanese state dithered in negotiating their release.

It is a small miracle that Lebanon’s relative peace in a turbulent Middle East has so far been maintained amid its near-total dysfunction, or that large-scale protests didn’t erupt sooner to lament the country’s many farces and absurdities. Perhaps it is a knack for survival, or just resignation. “What state?” asked one protester in central Beirut as he discussed the demands of the movement. “Even the good person among them is a pimp.”

There is a hint of irony that it took a rubbish crisis to prompt civil disobedience across the political spectrum. Then again, it is one crisis that has no sectarian component – the piles of rubbish and their rotten smell in the baking heat affect slums and mansions alike.

There is something profoundly symbolic about heaps of rubbish building up in the city’s streets that exemplifies the rot at Lebanon’s political core – the “You Stink” slogan adopted by the protesters not only refers to the garbage on the street but to the country’s politicians, who have spent too long in the corridors of power, meticulously building up their influence.

“Lebanon survives against all odds in a troubled environment thanks to a remarkable immune system, but that resilience has become an excuse for a dysfunctionality and laissez-faire attitude by its political class that could ultimately prove the country’s undoing,” the International Crisis Group said in a report in July, adding that Lebanon has left its problems to “multiply, deepen and fester”.

“The brinkmanship that Lebanese politicians have honed into an art gives few assurances for the future. It would be dangerous enough for an acrobat to repeat a deadly act too often; it would be sheer folly to do so while allowing his equipment to deteriorate,” it added.