The Free Patriotic Movement’s political council held its periodic meeting electronically on Saturday, chaired by Movement Chief Gebran Bassil, following which it issued a statement indicating that “after the end of the parade staged by the Prime Minister-designate at the Presidential Palace in search for electoral popularity, he ought to return to the constitutional principles that he knows well and which he had previously adopted in forming every government, because it is the only way to form any cabinet of any kind.”
The statement stressed that “the Free Patriotic Movement will not participate in the government and will not give it confidence on the foundations proposed by the PM-designate,” expressing refusal “to give the PM-designate and his team ‘a half plus one power’ in the government because he will use it to prevent reform, disrupt the forensic audit and brake all attempts to fight corruption.”
“There are internal and external reasons that have prevented the PM-designate until now from seriously resolving to form the government and camouflaging these reasons by orchestrating flimsy arguments, considering time in his favor as long as he does not bear direct responsibility for stopping the collapse, but rather throws the responsibility on the president of the republic and the caretaker government,” the statement went on.
The FPM political body criticized the PM-designate and his supporting political team for “fabricating a crisis with the head of state, and creating the problem of the third veto power, which was never a goal or demand in itself by the president who announced this repeatedly…”
It added that the PM-designate “also fabricates the issue of the size of cabinet and clings to the number 18 because it clearly and deliberately excludes the diversity of two basic components in the country (Catholics and Druze), and he refuses to move to the numbers of 20, 22 or 24, even though there are solutions to what he complains about in regards to the third veto and specialization…”
Moreover, the political council criticized the PM-designate for keeping the cabinet formation in a stand-by mode while the Lebanese suffer from the deteriorating conditions, without venturing into presenting an integrated government line-up or at least a clear methodological paper that is agreed upon between PM-designate Saad Hariri and President Michel Aoun and has the approval of the majority of parliamentary blocs.
The FPM body concluded its statement by emphasizing that escaping reform cannot last forever, as the government will eventually be formed and the Movement will play the role of constructive opposition from the outside, within the parliament and in the street, and will continue to pursue the cabinet positively until it complies with the necessity of conducting the forensic audit and recovering the money transferred abroad and applying the Capital Control, alongside the necessary reforms needed to stop the public waste expenditure, control revenues and stop all forms of corruption in the state administrations, and so on…It also pledged that FPM will continue the struggle to uncover the facts about the stolen depositors ‘money, the policies that led to that, and plans and solutions to return the looted funds.
Source: NNA
