Bassil: We Have Reservations on Budget, Concerns over Implementation

Free Patriotic Movement chief MP Jebran Bassil on Tuesday announced that the FPM has reservations over the draft 2019 state budget and over what might happen during its discussion in Parliament.

“We have reservations over a lot of things in the state budget and we have concerns over what might happen in Parliament and during implementation,” Bassil said after the weekly meeting of the Strong Lebanon parliamentary bloc.

“We prevented collapse through the state budget but what happened is not sufficient to achieve an economic rise,” Bassil warned.

“We cannot say that this is an austerity budget and we cannot say that the budget is based on an economic vision,” he pointed out.

He however boasted that “a lot of taboos were broken” in the Cabinet's debate on the budget.

“We have reduced the size of the public sector without making a drastic change,” he added.

“The deficit reduction is good but less than what's needed... We achieved a lot of things in this state budget but the things that remain pending are much more,” Bassil noted.

The Cabinet held 19 sessions to finalize the budget and several parties accused Foreign Minister Bassil of hindering the discussions with side proposals.

Lebanon has vowed to slash public spending to unlock $11 billion worth of aid pledged by international donors during an April 2018 conference in Paris.

Last month, Prime Minister Saad Hariri vowed to introduce "the most austere budget in Lebanon's history" to combat the country's bulging fiscal deficit.

Lebanon is one of the world's most indebted countries, with public debt estimated at 141 percent of GDP in 2018, according to credit ratings agency Moody's.