by naharnet.com -- Al-Mustaqbal Movement said Sunday that PM-designate Saad Hariri has already presented the line-up of a reformist cabinet to President Michel Aoun, slamming what it called Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil’s “obstacles” and “sectarian and racist standards.” “The Movement leaves it to the Lebanese people to believe or not believe (ex-)Minister Bassil, seeing as we as a Movement will not engage in political polemics that will not bring the country an anti-coronavirus vaccine nor will return the economic cycle to its right track nor will rebuild Beirut and compensate those affected by the port blast,” al-Mustaqbal said in a statement. The statement comes in response to remarks voiced by Bassil in a televised address earlier in the day. “The government is ready and (its line-up) is waiting with the President,” al-Mustaqbal said, adding that such a government “will be a mission government that undertakes the needed reforms according to the French initiative and not according to the sectarian and racist Bassilist standards.” “This is what concerns us and not anything else, no matter how much they get creative in creating obstacles and producing controversial issues,” the Movement added.

Bassil had earlier in the day accused Hariri on insisting on a “government of specialists” in order to “marginalize and eliminate” Aoun, the FPM and Lebanon’s Christians. “There is no expertise nor standards nor rules in what is being proposed,” Bassil added, noting that Hariri has given the Shiite and Druze communities what they want. “We do not entrust Hariri alone with reform and to them this government is aimed at seizing control of the country and returning us to the pre-2005 era,” he charged.

Progressive Socialist Party leader Walid Jumblat on Sunday noted that “amid the corona invasion” of Lebanon, “political debate no longer has any value or meaning.” “Some of us gets excited or drowns in local affairs while every day it becomes evident that we are going around in a vicious cycle,” Jumblat tweeted. “The human is threatened in his existence and this issue requires awareness, away from instinctive anthems that we strongly condemn and which contradict with human values and solidarity,” Jumblat added, apparently referring to sectarian and paramilitary anthems posted on social media by Druze activists in recent days. One of the videos shows military vehicles raising the flags of Jumblat’s Progressive Socialist Party. “The pandemic will spare no one,” Jumblat warned. His tweet came five minutes after Free Patriotic Movement chief Jebran Bassil delivered a fiery televised speech in which he hurled outright and veiled jabs at Jumblat and other political rivals.