BEIRUT (Dispatches) – Efforts to form a new Lebanese government after months of negotiation remain "on their way to a solution”, prime minister designate Saad al-Hariri said on Monday.
Last week President Michel Aoun said a government would be formed "very soon” and a government source said it would be agreed during the weekend, but press reports on Monday cited senior politicians saying problems persisted.
Parties have been jostling since May’s parliament election over ministerial positions in a new national unity government, but the political uncertainty has contributed to fears that Lebanon faces a looming economic crisis.
"Contacts continue to form a government and the issue is not impossible, as some are trying to suggest,” Hariri said in televised comments to reporters.
Lebanon has one of the world’s most indebted governments, owing about 150 percent of gross domestic product, and the International Monetary Fund warned early this year that Beirut must urgently undertake fiscal reforms.
President Aoun said in a Twitter post on Monday that circumstances required a rapid formation of the government.
A senior member of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement expressed uncertainty about the quick formation of a unity government in the Arab country, saying that he is neither optimistic nor pessimistic on the matter.
"Given the available data, there is no longer a possibility of speaking either optimistically or pessimistically about the government formation process,” Hezbollah’s Deputy Secretary General Sheikh Naim Qassem said during a memorial ceremony in the southern Lebanese city of Bint Jbeil on Sunday.
He added, "As long as there is a certain mechanism for government formation on one hand, and a veto on the other that stops the process ... then we don’t know whether the government will be formed in near or distant future.”
"Government formation is a public demand for people and a fundamental necessity… Economic issues can only be addressed once there is a government. We hope to break the deadlock and get the desired result,” the high-ranking Hezbollah official pointed out.