Parliamentary session on confidence vote in foreign minister abandoned due to lack of quorum

BEIRUT — A parliamentary session scheduled Thursday at 2 p.m. to vote on a request filed by Lebanese Forces MPs to withdraw confidence in Foreign Minister Abdallah Bou Habib was promptly abandoned due to lack of quorum. Bou Habib had arrived for the session shortly before 2 p.m., L'Orient Today's correspondent at UNESCO Palace where the session was due to take place reported.

Here’s what we know:

    • Just 53 MPs turned up for the session. At least 65 MPs are required to attain quorum. 

   • The request for a confidence vote came from Lebanese Forces MPs who accuse Bou Habib of “complicating” the ballot for Lebanese expatriates ahead of legislative elections scheduled abroad on May 6 and 8.

    • Lebanese living in Sydney raised concerns about the assignment of polling centers after they found out that voters from the same family had been assigned to different centers, sometimes several hours apart.

    • Lebanon’s consul general in Sydney, Charbel Macaron, has been accused by social media users and some media outlets of changing the electoral lists. The Foreign Affairs Ministry rejected these criticisms, noting that voters had been assigned to polling stations according to their Australian postal codes as they appeared on the registration forms.

    • Free Patriotic Movement head Gebran Bassil said after the attempted session that the interior and foreign affairs ministers are both responsible for the distribution of voting centers, and asked “why was confidence intended to be raised from the foreign affairs minister when the decision also came from the interior minister?” He went on to contend that the reason is that “the appeal is political, and they do not target the rest of the ministers.”

    • Bassil also alleged that there is a partisan elections machine that registered people incorrectly, and that “just as they flew the megacenter [away] in Lebanon, they are doing so in Australia, in order to control the decision of the people,” noting that “if there is a stupid person who has registered people in a wrong way, let him bear his responsibility, No political party holds it accountable.”

    • The head of the Parliamentary Justice Committee, MP George Adwan, also spoke following the attempted session, accusing former Foreign Minister Bassil of being “an active member in the system that brought Lebanon here [into the economic crisis].” Adwan also accused Bassil’s advisor, Pascal Dahrouj, of being the real person in charge of organizing the elections rather than Bou Habib.

    • Bou Habib also spoke, saying that “the responsibility for depositing the correct information during registration rests with the voter, and the ministry cannot modify expatriate polling stations and cannot meet the will of all parties,” adding that “despite the high cost of it, the expatriate voting process will take place and will be transparent.”