Hussein Dakroub| The Daily Star
BEIRUT: The absence of contacts among officials has dimmed hopes for any imminent breakthrough in the Cabinet formation deadlock, political sources said Thursday, heightening fears of a prolonged crisis with all the dire consequences this entails for the country’s stability and battered economy. “All signs indicate that the Cabinet formation process has been put off until after the New Year holiday,” a political source familiar with the formation process told The Daily Star.
Reflecting the difficulties, Future TV said in its news bulletin preamble Thursday night: “It seems that the government formation process is on vacation.”
Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri has maintained silence on the latest snags that scuttled his attempts to form a national unity government representing all the main parties ahead of the Christmas and New Year holidays as he and President Michel Aoun had promised.
The only comment he made was last Sunday following Beirut street protests against worsening economic conditions during which demonstrators vented their anger against politicians for failing to form a new government. “Sometimes silence is a must in order for the others to hear,” Hariri tweeted.
The gloomy Cabinet prospects came amid reported attempts to revive a stalled initiative launched by Aoun earlier this month that sought to resolve the problem of representing six Hezbollah-backed Sunni lawmakers in the next government.
“Efforts are focused on reviving the stalled initiative as a gateway that leads to the government formation,” the Central News Agency said, quoting political sources.
But it warned that this might not achieve the its goal, given the “current political developments” – a clear allusion to lingering differences among rival factions over portfolio distribution.
The agency expressed fear that a new round of consultations between the parties concerned with resolving the representation problem of the “Consultative Gathering,” the group of six Sunni MPs, might be doomed to fail like the previous one.
The six Thursday called on Aoun to resuscitate his initiative to resolve the problem of their representation, which has held up the Cabinet formation since late October.
This comes amid warnings by Lebanese and foreign officials that a prolonged Cabinet crisis would lead to an economic collapse, as well as to street riots that might threaten the country’s security and stability.
The pro-Hezbollah MPs’ call also comes after the emergence of new snags over a demand by caretaker Foreign Minister Gebran Bassil for a redistribution of some ministerial portfoliosx. “Things are at a standstill. We are waiting for the presidential initiative to be reactivated to resolve the problem of our representation in the new government,” MP Abdel-Rahim Mrad, one of the six lawmakers, told The Daily Star.
“We demand participation in a national unity government with a minister named by the Consultative Gathering who will exclusively represent us,” Mrad said.
He spoke after the group met at his residence in Beirut Thursday.
A statement issued after the meeting reiterated their right to be represented with a candidate who solely represents the group and does not belong to any bloc.
Mrad added that the six MPs, who are from outside the Future Movement, had sent Aoun a list of four candidates they had chosen to represent them.
Last weekend, they withdrew their support for Jawad Adra, one of four candidates they had proposed, saying they reached the decision because “Jawad Adra does not consider himself a representative of the group.”
“There are the names of three candidates with President Aoun to choose one of them as our representative,” Mrad said, adding that “a new hurdle” cropped up with Bassil’s demand for a redistribution of some ministries.
A key element of Aoun’s initiative calls for representing the six MPs from the president’s share with a candidate from outside their group, rather than one of the six lawmakers themselves, as they had previously demanded.
Bassil, the leader of the Free Patriotic Movement, also reportedly wanted Adra to be part of the FPM’s parliamentary Strong Lebanon bloc.
Political sources had told The Daily Star that Bassil wanted the six lawmakers to be represented by a minister close to his party so that the FPM and Aoun could maintain “a veto power,” or controlling 11 ministers in a 30-member Cabinet.
The Central News Agency, quoting political sources, said that an “overt struggle” was now raging between the FPM and Aoun on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other, over attaining veto power in the next Cabinet.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah and other party officials have said they did not object to Aoun and the FPM attaining a veto power.
But Speaker Nabih Berri, Hariri and former MP Walid Joumblatt, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, are reported to be opposing granting a veto power to the FPM.
The agency quoted the same sources as saying that the fastest and easiest way to achieve Cabinet formation lay in a return to the Constitution and to laws that the president said that some are trying to violate, seeking to imposing new norms.
Caretaker Education Minister Marwan Hamadeh warned that a prolonged Cabinet crisis might lead to clashes between security forces and protesters decrying the worsening economic crisis.
Speaking to the Voice of Lebanon radio station (93.3), Hamadeh called for a “compromise” over the Cabinet impasse after the New Year by agreeing on a representative of the Consultative Gathering and later launching an “immediate reform process.”
“A prolonged Cabinet vacuum might lead to street clashes or to a constituent conference [designed to agree on a new political system] that might plunge Lebanon into a dangerous stage,” he said.