Lebanon's Electricity Company Obstructs Work of State Institutions

Électricité du Liban building (Asharq Al-Awsat)
Électricité du Liban building (Asharq Al-Awsat)
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Lebanon's Electricity Company Obstructs Work of State Institutions

Électricité du Liban building (Asharq Al-Awsat)
Électricité du Liban building (Asharq Al-Awsat)

Hallway windows leading to the office of Lebanon’s prime minister in the Grand Serail in central Beirut are covered with curtains of another kind.

Wood panels, and pieces of reinforced nylon, are what separates the office from the outside world. Moreover, the hard shutters help air conditioning systems maintain indoor air quality and temperatures, especially when Prime Minister Najib Mikati is in his office receiving guests.

The government palace, since the deadly August 4 port explosion, has remained the same. Besides shattered glass, some of the Grand Serail’s institutions were put out of service.

However, some of the destruction was improved on—such as replacing window glass with hardened nylon.

Serail sources speak of a Kuwaiti pledge to repair what was damaged.

According to the same sources, the Council for Development and Reconstruction is expected to undertake the task of coordinating and developing studies in preparation for their execution.

Despite hopes and plans for fixing the damage sustained by the government palace, there remains the problem of electricity, which rarely reaches the Serail.

Power cuts have forced officials at the Serail to ration services that depend on electricity. They now turn off air conditioners in most of the government palace’s offices.

Air conditioning is only turned on in the prime minister’s office, whenever he is present or scheduled for meetings. When Mikati is gone, the officials go back to rationing electricity to a bare minimum.

The absence of the prime minister has become more evident recently, with him limiting his appointments to pre-noon hours only, and to four days a week in order to save energy and fuel.

As for Parliament, the recent power outage that prevented parliamentary committees from convening on Tuesday and before was not the first of its kind.

Most parliamentary sessions recently have suffered from power cuts, including the confidence session for Mikati’s government last year, and the election session for the speaker and his deputy months ago.

These power shortages paint a picture of how the public sector and government institutions in Lebanon are slowly collapsing under the brunt of Electricite du Liban’s inability to secure electricity and the institutions’ budgets failing to cover exchange rate differences.

The financial crisis that hit the country has affected the working mechanisms of the Lebanese state apparatus.

Banque du Liban and the state as a whole failing to recognize the collapse of the Lebanese pound, and their insisting on adopting the old price of 1,500 pounds to the dollar, renders state agencies unable to adapt to the currency’s realistic price.

On Tuesday, the Lebanese pound’s exchange rate crossed the threshold of 34,000 pounds to the dollar.

This has left state institutions unable to purchase supplies from abroad according to the official price.

Electricite du Liban constantly complains that the Central Bank is not complying with its request to convert what it owns in its accounts from pounds to dollars according to the official exchange rate to purchase equipment, spare parts, and fuel.

Consequently, Lebanon must live on fuel from Iraq.

Iraqi fuel only provides three hours of electricity each day, as opposed to the 12 hours daily that Lebanese plants can offer should fuel become more accessible.

A source in the Lebanese Parliament told Asharq Al-Awsat that the cause of the crisis was the lack of communication with the Director General of Electricite du Liban.

When contacting the chief of Electricite du Liban ahead of parliamentary sessions, to secure the parliament’s electricity, it was discovered that they were in the hospital due to a health crisis.

With the fuel needed to run power generators running out, the decision was to postpone the sessions.

According to the source, the inability to secure fuel can be traced back to the depletion of credits, which are still based on the exchange rate of 1,500 pounds to the dollar.

Additional credits have been requested from the Ministry of Finance, but they have not yet been secured, the source explained.

“Electricite du Liban can provide between 10 and 12 hours of electricity per day, in the event that the necessary fuel is secured, but we are currently limited to what reaches us from Iraqi fuel, which provides three hours of unstable supply,” a source at the Lebanese Energy Ministry told Asharq Al-Awsat.

As for Baabda Palace, its situation is relatively better, as it is characterized by a special treatment, as does the Ministry of Defense. The two institutions make up for what they lack in power supply by operating their own generators and securing fuel from their flexible and independent budget.

But this does not prevent momentary power outages in the President’s office when he receives his foreign guests. When the power goes out the President usually apologizes with a shy smile, offset by a smile of understanding from the guest who knows, like other foreign officials, the extent of the electricity problem in Lebanon.

“It is an unfortunate situation that the Parliament is forced to postpone the meeting of its committees due to the power outage and the unavailability of diesel fuel to operate the generator in the Parliament,” tweeted lawmaker Faisal al-Sayegh.

Sayegh blamed the head of the Free Patriotic Movement, Gebran Bassil.

Lebanon’s political class often exchanges blame for the electricity problem.

Those responsible for Lebanon’s power supply have not been able to resolve the electricity crisis since the end of the civil war in the nineties of the last century, despite the very large sums that were spent on this sector.

The failure to fix the public power sector has led to the emergence of a parallel electricity sector that is established on illegal private generators that are treated as a fait accompli.

While President Michel Aoun’s rivals hold his son-in-law, Bassil, responsible for the great waste and lack of achievement, the latter accuses the politicians opposing him of obstructing his mission.

Bassil had directly and indirectly supervised the sector for more than 15 years.

He sometimes blames the sector’s failures on Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, former Premier Saad Hariri and the current prime minister, Mikati.



US Envoy Reaffirms Backing for Damascus, Rules Out ‘Plan B’

US Ambassador to Türkiye and Special Envoy for Syria, Thomas Barrack, arrives for a meeting with the Lebanese prime minister at the government palace in Beirut, Lebanon, 07 July 2025. EPA/WAEL HAMZEH
US Ambassador to Türkiye and Special Envoy for Syria, Thomas Barrack, arrives for a meeting with the Lebanese prime minister at the government palace in Beirut, Lebanon, 07 July 2025. EPA/WAEL HAMZEH
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US Envoy Reaffirms Backing for Damascus, Rules Out ‘Plan B’

US Ambassador to Türkiye and Special Envoy for Syria, Thomas Barrack, arrives for a meeting with the Lebanese prime minister at the government palace in Beirut, Lebanon, 07 July 2025. EPA/WAEL HAMZEH
US Ambassador to Türkiye and Special Envoy for Syria, Thomas Barrack, arrives for a meeting with the Lebanese prime minister at the government palace in Beirut, Lebanon, 07 July 2025. EPA/WAEL HAMZEH

The United States will keep backing Syria’s government and has no “Plan B” to working with it to unite the war‑scarred country back together, still reeling from years of civil war and wracked by new sectarian violence, US envoy Tom Barrack said on Monday.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Barrack – Washington’s ambassador to Türkiye and special envoy for Syria, who is also on a short assignment in Lebanon – called last week’s Israeli strikes inside Syria “badly timed” and said they had “complicated efforts to stabilize the region.”

Barrack spoke in Beirut after more than a week of clashes in Sweida province between Druze militiamen and Sunni Bedouin tribes.

Over the weekend he brokered what he described as a limited ceasefire between Syria and Israel, aimed only at halting the fighting in Sweida. Syrian government troops have since redeployed in the area and evacuated civilians from both communities on Monday, he said.

Barrack told the AP that “the killing, the revenge, the massacres on both sides” are “intolerable,” but that “the current government of Syria, in my opinion, has conducted themselves as best they can as a nascent government with very few resources to address the multiplicity of issues that arise in trying to bring a diverse society together.”

Regarding Israel’s strikes on Syria, Barrack said: “The United States was not asked, nor did they participate in that decision, nor was it the United States’ responsibility in matters that Israel feels is for its own self-defense.”

However, he said Israel’s intervention “creates another very confusing chapter” and “came at a very bad time.”

Prior to the violence in Sweida, Israel and Syria had been in talks over security matters, while the Trump administration had been pushing them to move toward full normalization of diplomatic relations.

When the latest fighting erupted, “Israel’s view was that south of Damascus was this questionable zone, so that whatever happened militarily in that zone needed to be agreed upon and discussed with them,” Barrack said. “The new government (in Syria) coming in was not exactly of that belief.”

The ceasefire announced Saturday between Syria and Israel is a limited agreement addressing only the conflict in Sweida, he said. It does not address broader issues including Israel’s contention that the area south of Damascus should be a demilitarized zone.

In the discussions leading up to the ceasefire, Barrack said “both sides did the best they can” to reach agreement on specific questions related to the movement of Syrian forces and equipment from Damascus to Sweida.

He suggested that Israel would prefer to see Syria fragmented and divided rather than a strong central state in control of the country.

Later Monday, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz posted on X that Israel’s strikes “were the only way to stop the massacre of the Druze in Syria, the brothers of our brothers the Israeli Druze”.

Katz added: “Anyone who criticizes the attacks is unaware of the facts,” he continued. It was not clear if he was responding to Barrack’s comments.

Damascus has been negotiating with the Kurdish forces that control much of northeast Syria to implement an agreement that would merge the US-backed, Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces with the new national army.