The president of the parliamentary Finance Committee, MP Ibrahim Kanaan at the Parliament. Illustration photo NNA.
The head of the parliamentary finance committee, MP Ibrahim Kanaan, has called in a statement cited by the state-run National News Agency (NNA) on President of the Republic Joseph Aoun, caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, and Prime Minister-designate Nawaf Salam to withdraw the 2025 budget project submitted to Parliament by the caretaker Cabinet last September and to start over on completely new foundations.
The MP, who parted ways with the Free Patriotic Movement in 2024, considered that the document currently sitting in the drawers of the Chamber is no longer at all in line with the Lebanese economic reality and must be overhauled entirely. “The initial project aimed for an increase in expenditures and revenues of about 45 percent.”
However, with the war between Israel and Hezbollah, which occurred in the wake of five years of crisis, “the revenues the state could have expected in 2025 have decreased by at least 70 percent,” he explains to L’Orient-Le Jour to clarify his approach. He considers that it is preferable at this stage to allow the state to spend using the extension of the provisional twelfth rule for a few months until a coherent project is developed and sent to Parliament, even if it means it is adopted late - which is far from a first for the country.
The rule of the provisional twelfth is a constitutional rule normally reserved for cases in which Parliament has not voted on a budget by the end of January, but Lebanese leaders have used it as a legal argument to allow the state to spend without a budget for years.
