Gebran Bassil during a speech in Ain al-Tineh on June 10, 2024. (Credit: Gebran Bassil’s X account)
Head of the Free Patriotic Movement, MP Gebran Bassil, warned on Tuesday that "a settlement is being prepared to eliminate the expatriates’ right to vote," during a meeting of FPM's political council.
"I am speaking today to alert expatriates and Christians and their churches around the world, and to warn all Lebanese of all communities and regions where they live: you are on the verge of losing your right to vote from abroad, which we secured and enshrined in law," he said. "They are conspiring to take this right away from you."
Bassil also stated that the "government is ineffective" and "cannot serve the interests of the diaspora." "It is a government and authority completely incapable of presenting any project to the Lebanese people so far: no reformist budget, no reformist law, no plan to return funds to depositors," he added.
He further said that Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea had previously tried to outbid the FPM on the electoral law issue, noting that recordings still exist showing Geagea’s earlier approval of the law. "However, Geagea is now staging a coup, as he has always done," Bassil added.
The anti-Hezbollah camp is calling for an amendment to the 2017 expat voting law, an amendment that Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri categorically refuses and that is currently polarizing Parliament and threatening to delay the spring 2026 legislative elections.
Bassil added, “There are video and audio recordings of several MPs at the time, especially MP Georges Adwan, who represented the Lebanese Forces, and these should be heard to expose the big lie told by the Lebanese Forces leader, who claimed that they had opposed the law and that I imposed it on them.”
He announced the submission of a proposal that gives Lebanese expatriates an additional option: to choose whether they want to vote for diaspora representatives or for domestic representatives, with prior coordination through two separate ballot boxes.
MPs in favor of amending the electoral law have already boycotted legislative sessions, leaving the scheduled agenda pending.
Parties supporting changing the diaspora voting law, which was passed in 2017 but never implemented, have drawn up an urgent draft law that removes Article 112, meaning overseas voters would vote for MPs in their ancestral villages, regardless of when they last lived there.
Article 112 mandates that expat voters would be allocated six seats in Parliament, explicitly designated to represent the Lebanese diaspora, to be added to the existing 128 MPs.
Hezbollah, the Amal Movement, and the FPM are calling for the law to be implemented as is.
