A Future Jordan - نحن الأردن

Political crisis in Jordan: Jordanian parliament, Prime Minister’s new government lock horns over economic team - meaning Bassem Awadallah

Political crisis in Jordan: Jordanian parliament, Prime Minister’s new government lock horns over economic team.
MIDDLE EAST ONLINE

AMMAN - The government of Jordan's new Prime Minister Adnan Badran is locked in a dispute with parliament, which has come out in open revolt against members of his cabinet and threatened a no confidence vote.

"Most MPs in the loyalist camp have clearly stated they will not vote for a confidence motion in the Badran government so long as it includes the ministerial economic team which is considered suspect," deputy speaker Mamduh Abbadi said.

The team is led by Finance Minister Bassem Awadallah, who was ousted from the previous cabinet but made a comeback less than two months later in the Badran government formed last month.

"The deputies think these ministers are foreign to Jordan, have no credibility and do not understand Jordan's people or society, or the situation of the poor in this country," Abbadi said.

At a rowdy meeting between deputies and the prime minister on Tuesday, MPs urged Badran to drop Awadallah and his supporters from the government or risk losing a confidence vote.

A petition has been presented to the premier to demand the lineup be modified, leading a political analyst in Amman to comment that the crisis has "transformed the loyalists into the opposition for the first time in Jordan".

Badran, a respected 69-year-old academic, on April 7 formed a 25-minister cabinet and kept in his line-up 12 members of the former administration of Faisal al-Fayez. His appointment was seen as a sign that a democratic reform process would be speeded up.

But a former minister, the Islamist independent MP Abdullah Akayleh, said the new economic team were "a clique of 'new liberals' with a foreign agenda who do not know Jordan, its priorities and its concerns".

They "take their orders from abroad" and many of them "represent foreign companies", he charged - (In my humble opinion, this is a big pile of rubbish. Dr. Basem in specific, is cleaner than anyone of these insignificant so called representatives of the people. He has done more to the country than all of them put together.)

posted by Ashraf Zeitoon @ 12:16 AM