Progressive Socialist Party leader MP Walid Jumblatt told on Monday MTV that the Hezbollah-led March 8 parties “should shoulder responsibility.”
“Some March 8 parties, or all of them, should assume responsibility…and this includes renewing the term of Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh because he succeeded in protecting Lebanon during the Global Financial Crisis in the past and can do it again in the future,” Jumblatt said
He also criticized the caretaker PM and asked, “Why doesn’t outgoing Prime Minister Saad Hariri do his job as a caretaker PM?”
“ Hariri’s absence points that he might not even care about running the caretaker cabinet and thus we must remind him that he is still an outgoing premier and not just the head of the Future Movement.”
Asked about Speaker Nabih Berri’s call to convene parliament on June 8, Jumblatt said, “We understand Berri’s motive but he must understand our keen interest in not replacing the cabinet with the parliament.”
He said he will only attend the May 8 session that Berri called for if there is only one item on the agenda and that is to ” extend the term of Salameh”
Jumblatt denied MP Michel Murr’s statement and said that that “he did not switch alliances.”
Murr said that Jumblatt is in the process of another U turn.
Jumblatt officially defected from March 14 coalition in January 2011 when he voted for Hezbollah candidate as the new prime minister.
Najib Mikati, who was appointed to the premiership in January with the backing of the Hezbollah-led March 8 has been working since January to form a government.
Syria
In his weekly column in his party’s mouthpiece al-Anbaa newspaper, Jumblatt called for a “real implementation” of the decree issued recently by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on lifting the decades-old state of emergency in the unrest-hit country.
Addressing Sunday’s bloodshed in the occupied Golan Heights in which Syrian state television said 23 people were killed and 350 wounded when Israeli troops shot at protesters marking Naksa Day, Jumblat said “what happened on the occupied Golan front proves that the Arab-Israeli conflict has not ended yet.”
The PSP leader stressed the need that “Syria be more immune in the face of the Israeli scheme, which wants to drag it along with other Arab states into chaos and sectarian conflicts, and consequently to undermine the defiance and resistance scheme.”
“Out of our keenness on Syria and its stability, we look forward for it to exit its current crisis towards a new era characterized by political, economic and social reform,” Jumblatt added.
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