After days and 18 meetings with Aoun, he has yet failed to form a government. He met with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey in January 2021, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi in Egypt in February, and visited Mohammed bin Zayed in United Arab Emirates several times. Hariri has been criticized for spending a great amount of time outside Lebanon, while the absence of a government worsened the financial crisis in the country, and his trips were seen as an attempt to compensate the support he lacked from Saudi Arabia.