BICOM

Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has declared “victory” in Lebanon’s first parliamentary elections since 2009.

Reuters said preliminary results showed Hezbollah and its allies had won at least 67 of the 128 seats in parliament. Although the official results have not been announced, Nasrallah said the results guaranteed the protection of the “resistance” against Israel. Current Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri believes his Western-backed Future Movement has lost a third of its seats.

Hariri said: “We had hoped for a better result, it’s true. And we were hoping for a wider bloc, with a higher Shia and Christian representation, that’s also true. But everyone could see that the Future Movement was facing a project to eliminate it from political life.”

Despite the loss, Hariri is expected to be asked to form a new unity government. He will likely emerge from the elections as a weaker figure and be even less able to exert influence over Hezbollah than in the past.

According to the Lebanese constitution, the Prime Minister must be a Sunni Muslim, the Speaker of Parliament a Shia and the President a Maronite Christian.

The election has produced two clearly divided blocs, the pro-Western and Saudi-backed March 14 alliance and the pro-Syrian and Hezbollah-led March 8 alliance. This divide emerged following the assassination of Rafik Hariri in February 2005 and the ensuing protests in Beirut.

Israeli Education Minister and leader of the Jewish Home party Naftali Bennett wrote on Twitter: “The state of Israel will not differentiate between the sovereign state of Lebanon and Hezbollah, and will view Lebanon as responsible for any action from within its territory.”

Security analyst Yossi Melman wrote in Maariv that the effect of the results “is negligible” as “Hezbollah will continue to be the dominant force in Lebanese politics and will maintain the army that it established, numbering approximately 30,000 soldiers and with a stock of more than 100,000 rockets and missiles”.

He said that the election demonstrates how “Hezbollah has been trying to turn itself into more of a Lebanese organisation and to be depicted less as an extension of Iran”.

The Lebanese constitution states that all major government decisions must be approved by two thirds of its members.