Hezbollah and its allies said on Monday they would boycott a parliamentary session to prevent the anti-Syrian majority from electing a new president for Lebanon. Police and troops clamped extra security around the assembly building in Beirut before Tuesday's session, whose original purpose of picking a successor to pro-Syrian President Emile Lahoud looks doomed to fail.
Lahoud's term ends on November 23. "If there is no consensus (on a new president), our bloc will not attend the session," Ali Hassan Khalil, one of 16 MPs loyal to Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, an ally of Damascus who also heads the Shia Amal movement, told Reuters.
Amal and its opposition partners, Shia Hezbollah and Christian leader Michel Aoun's faction, plan to send only five MPs each, blocking any chance of mustering the two-thirds quorum required to elect a president in the first round of voting.
Berri, speaking after meeting influential Maronite Christian Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, said he hoped a deal could be reached on a new president - who must be a Maronite under Lebanon's sectarian power-sharing system - before time runs out. "I'd like to reassure the Lebanese that the climate is not as grim as everyone imagines," he told reporters. "There will be a president for Lebanon before November 24 with the consensus of all the Lebanese, God willing."
Samir Geagea, a Christian leader in the anti-Syrian bloc, said the opposition's tactics put Lebanon in peril. "Anyone who delays the election of a president for a moment contributes to exposing the Lebanese deputies and the Lebanese people to grave danger," he told a news conference.
Last week's assassination of Christian MP Antoine Ghanem reduced the anti-Syrian bloc's already slim majority in the 128-seat assembly. He was the fourth anti-Syrian legislator to be slain since the last parliamentary election in 2005.
The presidential contest, the first since Syrian troops left Lebanon in April 2005, has aggravated what was already the country's worst political crisis since the 1975-90 civil war.
Armoured troop carriers, fire engines and ambulances strengthened a cordon around parliament and nearby Serail government headquarters, already sealed off by barbed wire from a tent camp the opposition set up nearly 10 months ago to try to topple Prime Minister Fouad Siniora's US-backed cabinet. The government, which fears more attempts to cut its majority by assassination, met to discuss security for the parliament meeting, the first Berri has called this year.
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