Lebanese Expats Feel Underrepresented in Next Parliamentary Elections
The body that represents the Lebanese diaspora criticized the government on Wednesday for failing to allow millions of expatriates to have the right representation in parliament.
President of the World Lebanese Cultural Union Michel El Douaihy told An Nahar daily that there are around 12-15 million Lebanese expatriates, which means four or five times more than the number of Lebanese residing in the country.
The expats hold onto their voting rights in the next parliamentary elections more than anything else, he said.
El Douaihy’s comment came a day after the government approved an electoral draft-law that allows the expats to vote only for 6 candidates divided equally between Christians and Muslims.
This decision increased the number of parliamentarians to 134. But the draft-law is yet to be approved by the parliament where it is likely to face strong opposition.
“The Cultural Union calls for the number of MPs to be in harmony with the huge number of expats” in the world, the union’s president said.
“We can’t accept an appeasement,” he told An Nahar, stressing there are around 200,000 Lebanese residing in Africa and another 200,000 in Europe, which each should be represented by around 2 MPs.
As for the United States and Canada, they should at least get 6 lawmakers, he said. Australia should be represented by 4 while Brazil’s expats should be allowed to have 10 MPs and Latin America another 6.
Despite El Douaihy’s objections, Interior Minister Marwan Charbel praised the approval of the draft-law as an “achievement” and a “white revolution that we hope would be ended by parliament’s approval.”
He told As Safir newspaper, that he would discuss with Foreign Minister Adnan Mansour the mechanism that would allow the expats to vote and ways to prevent the same person from casting his ballot twice.
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