BEIRUT, 19 May 2005 — An election list led by the son of Lebanon’s slain former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri has already won eight of 19 seats up for grabs in Beirut without a vote being cast, officials said yesterday. A spate of candidate withdrawals this week means that at least eight candidates on Saad Hariri’s ticket have won by default a full 11 days before the capital votes on May 29.
About 400,000 people are eligible to vote in Beirut, where the first round of Lebanon’s phased polls will take place. The mainly Muslim city was the political bastion of the elder Hariri, a Sunni billionaire businessman assassinated on Feb. 14.
Meanwhile, opposition leader Michel Aoun visited a fellow-Maronite Christian civil war foe in his prison cell near Beirut yesterday, drawing a line under a bloody rift that tore their community apart 15 years ago. “This visit today ... comes to turn a page of the past that now belongs to history and to look to the future,” the retired general told reporters after his one-hour meeting with former militia chief Samir Geagea in a cell at the Defense Ministry.
