BEIRUT (LEBANON) – Lebanon’s top Christian cleric said on Sunday a new government must focus on urgent economic and other reforms, instead of going back to the past corrupt ways.
Patriarch Bechara Boutros Al-Rai, leader of the Maronite church, has been influential as a religious leader of the biggest Christian community in Lebanon, where political power is shared between its main Christian, Muslim and Druze sects.
Prime Minister-designate Mustapha Adib, a Sunni Muslim, is in talks to form a cabinet at the earliest by mid September, after pressure was imposed by French President Emmanuel Macron.
The patriarch urged for setting up an emergency government that was “small, qualified and strong” in his Sunday sermon, and asserted that the new cabinet should not return to past ways of “clientelism, corruption and bias”.
He said, adding it must “negotiate responsibly” with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), “Fateful times require a government in which there is no monopoly of portfolios, no sharing out of benefits, no dominance by one group, and no landmines that disrupt its work and decisions.”
His comments were carried by an-Nahar newspaper website and other Lebanese media.
