Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Hassan Diab announced Monday that his cabinet will not hold a meeting to approve the 2021 draft budget. The budget was supposed to be approved in fall last year.
This means the state will continue to spend based on the Constitution’s “provisional twelfth of the preceding financial year”, which allows government spending outside the budget.
“We noticed that the caretaker PM does not want to convene a cabinet session before the issuance of an explicit opinion from parliament to interpret the Constitution regarding holding sessions under the caretaker government,” Hussein Obeid from the Association of Full-time Professors at the Lebanese University, said following a meeting with Diab on Monday.
The PM’s decision brings an end to recent debates among political forces on whether the current caretaker government has the constitutional right to approve a budget.
Some political blocs in Lebanon believe that a caretaker government is not allowed to meet to approve a draft budget while others say that Article 64 of the Constitution entitles it to exercise its powers.
Last month, caretaker Finance Minister Ghazi Wazni submitted the 2021 draft budget to the cabinet for approval. The draft was accompanied by a detailed report on the principles adopted in preparing the project and the most prominent variables between the 2020 and 2021 budget draft.
However, the new draft budget raised objections among public sector employees, professors, teachers and syndicates, because it omitted some rights of civil and military public sector employees, including a deduction of 45 percent of the retirement pension of deceased retirees and the abolition of the third-category employees’ right to first degree hospitalization.
