Lebanon’s Hezbollah urges ‘cooperation’ as vote brings no majority

Beirut – AFP

The head of Lebanon’s powerful Shiite movement Hezbollah called Wednesday on parliamentary factions to cooperate, following elections that saw no bloc achieve a majority and the representation of independent lawmakers rise.

Nobody “can claim that the majority belongs to this or that group,” said Hassan Nasrallah, acknowledging for the first time that his organization and its allies lost their overall parliamentary majority in Sunday’s poll.

Hezbollah and its allies — comprised of fellow Shiite movement Amal and a Christian bloc led by President Michel Aoun — fell just short of the 65 seats needed to control the 128-seat chamber, after accounting for around 70 lawmakers in the last parliament.

The elections came as Lebanon remains mired in one of the modern world’s worst-ever economic crises — one that has seen the currency lose more than 90 percent of its value against the dollar and the unemployment rate nearly triple to 30 percent since 2019.

Urging factions to co-operate, Nasrallah warned that “emptiness, chaos and failure” were “the alternative to partnership and cooperation.”

Backed by Iran, Hezbollah is a major political and military force, described by its supporters as a bulwark against Israel, and by its detractors as a state within a state whose continued existence prevents any kind of democratic change in Lebanon.