BEIRUT, 30 May 2005 — Candidates led by the son of slain ex-Premier Rafik Hariri won all the seats in Beirut in Lebanon’s general election yesterday, a government source said.
“The count is nearly over and it’s a landslide for Hariri’s list,” said the source, who asked not to be identified.
Beirut was the first region to go to the polls. Other regions vote over the next three Sundays.
Saad Hariri’s anti-Syrian bloc had already won nine of the capital’s 19 seats in the 128-member Parliament before the vote because they were not contested. The source said candidates on Hariri’s list had taken all 10 undecided seats.
“This victory is for Rafik Hariri. Today Beirut showed its loyalty to Rafik Hariri,” Saad Hariri, 35, told a crowd celebrating outside his villa in the capital. “Today is a victory for democracy... freedom and sovereignty.”
Thousands of jubilant supporters drove through the streets of the capital, honking car horns and flying Lebanese flags as fireworks lit the night sky over Beirut’s center, rebuilt by the slain Hariri from the ruins of the 1975-1990 civil war.
Hariri’s widow and son, and newly elected candidates visited his grave in downtown Beirut after the results were known.
The young Hariri is a billionaire businessman thrust into politics by the Feb. 14 killing of his father, who as prime minister was the symbol of Lebanon’s postwar reconstruction.
But voters denied Hariri the high turnout he sought in the first elections in three decades with no Syrian troops in Lebanon. Interior Minister Hassan Sabaa put the turnout at 28 percent.
The capital had a 34 percent turnout in 2000, when Hariri’s father, then cooperating with Syria, also swept the board.
UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen congratulated Lebanon for conducting the first round of polling successfully. “These elections... represent a significant step for the Lebanese people in their quest for recovering their full political independence and sovereignty,” he said in a statement. Only a handful of pro-Syrian leftists and Muslim hard-liners competed with Hariri’s Future bloc in mainly Sunni Muslim Beirut, where around 400,000 people were eligible to vote.
