What are Charbel Nahhas and Fadi Abboud Doing in the Same Political Party?

One is rumored to be a closet communist and the other is a capitalist industrialist par excellence. Yet they are both tagging along in the same political party.

The spat between ministers Charbel Nahhas and Fadi Abboud over the minimum wage hike is not the kind of minor disagreements colleagues regularly have. This is a fundamental ideological difference that typically causes people in democracies to join opposite parties, parties that will never agree on economic issues and who leave it to the voters to decide which direction they prefer.

The FPM, like other Lebanese parties is built around people, not economic issues. But even by Lebanese standards the combination of Nahhas and Abboud is odd. You won’t find a leftist economist big-wig in the Future Movement and you won’t find a Milton Friedman becoming a minister at the Progressive Socialist Party. Parties left and right do join coalitions, but on economic issues Lebanese parties are internally harmonious.

I took a look at the FPM Charter and found this paragraph:

10. [The FPM aspires to] adhere to the free economic system and personal initiative within the boundaries of human dignity and the welfare and principles of social justice.

This “aspiration” is loaded with keywords that are designed to please both the left and the right, but it doesn’t actually mean anything. The FPM is not even a centrist party, as Nahhas’ extreme minimum wage proposal illustrated yesterday. This is an ideologically multipolar beast designed around people and narrow interests.