Hezbollah Head Hails Electoral ‘Victory’ as Protection from Calls to Disarm

BEIRUT-Hezbollah and its allies have won a small majority of seats in Lebanon’s first parliamentary election in almost a decade, the militia and political group said, boosting its influence and giving its patron Iran greater sway over the country.

Lebanon’s Hizbollah paramilitary movement emerged as the main victor in the country’s first election in nearly a decade, securing veto power in the Lebanese Parliament as the prime minister’s fortunes fell. Naftali Bennett, the hawkish leader of Jewish Home, insists Israel should consider that “Lebanon equals Hezbollah” from now on.

The results from Sunday elections would enhance the Resistance Movement led by Hezbollah politically.

The question of Hezbollah’s weapons has slipped down the political agenda in Lebanon in recent years.

“Hariri’s loss would be the distinguishing mark of those elections, which can have penalties on the battle to kind a brand new authorities”, the pro-Hezbollah Al-Akhbar day by day wrote earlier on Monday.

A Hezbollah flag placed atop the statue of Rafik Hariri in Beirut after the May 6 elections.

Interior Minister Nouhad Machnouk announced the final results on Monday evening.

Nasrallah said he would not jump to conclusions regarding the official results, but that he did consider his group’s objective had been reached.

Hezbollah and its allies appear set to take at least 47 seats in the 128-seat parliament, which would enable them to veto any laws it opposes.

Supporters of an outside candidate forecast to win a seat in parliament in Lebanon’s national elections have gathered outside the Interior Ministry to protest what they say are clear signs of fraud to deny her victory.

Hezbollah, which was created in the 1980s to fight against Israel and now battles in Syria alongside regime forces, is listed as a terror organization by the United States.

Yet campaigning for the parliamentary election, the first in nine years, has timidly sidestepped the big issues, leaving many Lebanese expecting more of the same.

Prime Minister Saad Hariri’s Future Movement party, backed by Saudi Arabia and western countries, acknowledged it had lost seats.

It will also benefit from the fragmentation of its foes, among them Hariri whose Sunni-dominated Future Movement could go down as the election’s biggest loser.

Hezbollah, Amal and their allies appear to have secured more than the “obstructionist third” needed to block the most important actions of parliament, Kemal Feghali, a veteran Lebanese pollster, told Al Jazeera.

Still, FPM remains the largest Christian presence in parliament, with Gebran Bassil, the party’s head and foreign minister, winning a seat for the first time, after failing to do so in the 2009 elections. And this in a context of high tension both on sourn border that it shares with Lebanon and in Syrian strife where Hebrew army has repeatedly bombarded Hezbollah and its Iranian godfar.

Sayyed was one of the most powerful men in Lebanon in the 15 years of Syrian domination that followed the 1975-90 civil war.

Official results showed one candidate from a grassroots movement of activists, journalist Paula Yaacoubian, won a seat in the capital, an area traditionally monopolized by establishment political parties.

Geagea is Hezbollah’s most prominent Lebanese Christian opponent.