Threat of weapons makes elections impossible
The National Liberal Party said that they were concerned by demands that participation in the national dialogue be expanded. They also said that it was impossible to hold democratic parliamentary elections in the shadow of armed violence.
After a weekly meeting on Friday, the party issued a press release that said there were two principal points regarding the national dialogue. The first was that the most recent such dialogue achieved nothing significant. The second was that, with Doha Accords having been signed in May, there was now no excuse for keeping the issues of weapons and national defense strategy out of the dialogue.
The party had harsh words for Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, and said his attitude toward Lebanon was both dishonest and demeaning “to the intelligence of the Lebanese people…[Assad] ridicules their suffering and sacrifices.”
“Syria wants to maintain its hegemony over Lebanon by deepening divisions and supporting certain powers (Hezbollah) that want to build a state within the state,” the party said.
The party also addressed the deputy prime minister controversy, which it said was reminiscent of previous anti-corruption campaigns that were primarily concerned with sloganeering, but took no initiative to form any investigative parliamentary committee (an indirect reference to PM Michel Aoun the figure behind both the anti-corruption campaign and the deputy prime minister issue).