Word: parliament
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...disarm Hizballah and take to trial the murderers of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri. The same Hizballah sources told me that an interim administration that shares any part of the March 14 agenda is also not acceptable to Hizballah, which controls a third of the seats in the parliament...
...What that means is that aside from refusing the two-thirds quorum needed to elect a President in parliament, Hizballah is considering an attack on the French U.N. contingent in southern Lebanon. The aim of such a move would no only be to convince the French to stop meddling in Lebanon, but also to serve as a response to France's implicit threat to bomb Iran if Iran does not stop its nuclear development...
Lebanon's art-deco parliament building in downtown Beirut has the look of an old-time movie palace, which seemed appropriate on Tuesday as a steady stream of armored black luxury cars disgorged the country's politicians, who walked up the steps through a gauntlet of journalists as if they were actors at a high-security red-carpet ceremony. As it happened, however, the show was a dud. Meeting for the first time in over nine months, Lebanon's parliament opened today for a special session to elect a president of the republic, and then almost immediately shut down without...
...hitch in parliament was that the Hizballah-led opposition - which controls over a third of the chamber's deputies - boycotted the proceedings, preventing the country's majority from having the two-thirds quorum necessary to move to a vote. But the larger problem is that the country's factions are locked in a struggle that has become part of the regional struggle for Middle East supremacy, with Syria and Iran on one side and American and Israel on the other...
Though they have fewer representatives in parliament, the opposition was able to delay the presidential vote because Lebanon's sectarian political system has a series of checks and balances that keeps governments weak and any one religious group from holding too much power. Thus, major official positions such as the president (who must be Christian), the prime minister (who must be Sunni Muslim) and the speaker of parliament (who must be Shi'a Muslim) are usually chosen by a process that includes both elections and negotiation. The idea is to have national consensus and avoid the kind of disputes that...