2024-04-25 21:33:55
Ghida Gebeili (Beirut)
Yesterday, the Lebanese Parliament postponed the municipal elections for a year, according to the official National News Agency, extending for the third consecutive time in two years the mandate of the current local councils, based on the impossibility of holding them , particularly in the south of the country.
The agency reported that the House of Representatives, meeting under the chairmanship of its President Nabih Berri, following reaching quorum, approved a bill extending the mandate of the existing municipal and elective councils until a date at the latest on 05/31/2025.
The reasons for the extension indicated that this right “intervenes in a complex security, military and political context”, in reference to the violence in the south.
Nabih Berri had previously confirmed that the south might not be excluded from the municipal elections, following demanding that the vote be held on time.
The extension was approved yesterday, despite opposition from parliamentary blocs, led by the Lebanese Forces Party, the Phalanges Party and the Renewal Bloc, as well as a number of Forces of Change and independent representatives. They boycotted the session, while Hezbollah and its members. the allies supported the extension proposal with the Free Patriotic Movement.
Furthermore, politicians and observers made statements to the Al-Ittihad Information Center in which they stressed that Lebanon needs municipal elections, especially in the south, more than anywhere else, and that even s Although it is technically impossible to organize them in the south, they can take place in the rest of Lebanon with a postponement of two or four months in the south until conditions allow them to be carried out there.
Some of them considered that the postponement of local elections would aggravate the crises of the Lebanese people and that this represents a catastrophe for municipal work and the tasks of local authorities, given that the latter are qualified, in the face of the economic crisis, to play a role that helps people in the development and delivery of services, especially as 20 percent of current councils have become disbanded and under the purview of the Home Office, while the rest are flabby and suffering internal conflicts.
The head of the Lebanese Forces Party, Samir Geagea, declared in a tweet published on the “X” platform that “Hezbollah, its allies and the Free Patriotic Movement have once once more deprived the Lebanese of the possibility of electing the local authorities”, noting that the municipalities are the only authorities “which have remained almost alone with the population”. They try to solve all possible problems following collapse, vacancy and instability.
Municipal councils in Lebanon play a leading role in providing basic services to the population, but their role has significantly diminished in recent years due to the ongoing economic collapse hitting the country since 2019, which has led to a reduction in funds allocated. to these councils in order to carry out their tasks, and also pushed many of their members to resign.
Lebanese law stipulates that municipal elections take place every 6 years. Lebanese people last elected their municipal councils in 2016, but they were postponed until 2022 to coincide with legislative elections. Then the financial crisis led to their postponement a second time. in 2023 due to the lack of financial funds necessary for their realization. Also this year, the Lebanese will not be able to exercise their democratic right for the third time in a row, which reflects the depth of the political crisis with the persistent vacancy of the presidential position in the country.
The postponement of the dates of constitutional deadlines is not something new in political practice in Lebanon, because the existing system of compromises and quotas between political and sectarian forces often leads to the delay of important decisions, including the formation of the government and the election of the President of the Assembly. Republic. This is why Lebanon finds itself in a state of presidential vacuum, government vacuum and local authority vacuum, which is a three-dimensional vacuum that is the worst a country can be exposed to in the world.
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