Issued on:
Lebanon's prime minister-designate Mustapha Adib said Thursday he was extending efforts to strike a deal on an emergency cabinet line-up despite missing a French deadline.
Advertising Read more
"I am fully aware that we do not have the luxury of time," he said in a brief statement after meeting President Michel Aoun.
French President Emmanuel Macron had given Lebanon's main political players a two-week deadline to agree on a line-up of experts whose job would be to address multiple crises.
The deadline expired on Wednesday with no result, prompting Macron to voice his disappointment.
"I am counting on everyone's cooperation to form a government whose task will be to implement what was agreed upon with President Macron," said Adib.
The French leader, who travelled to Beirut twice since an August 4 port explosion disfigured the city, had demanded Lebanon's factions set no conditions on the line-up of the crisis government.
France had warned that the combined effects of one of the largest explosions in history and of a critical debt crisis posed an existential threat to the 100-year-old state.
The two main Shiite groups in Lebanon's usual power-sharing arrangement, howeveRead More – Source
