New PM says Lebanon's June election faces possible delay

PanARMENIAN.Net - Lebanon's June election faces a possible delay, Prime Minister-designate Tammam Salam said, as he prepared to form a government which aims to resolve months of dispute over the vote and shield the country from war in neighboring Syria, according to Reuters.

Salam, a moderate who won broad political support to become premier, said he would try to bring all of Lebanon's rival factions into a government whose main priority was paving the way for the parliamentary election.

But with most political blocs opposed to the existing electoral law - including the powerful Iran-backed Hezbollah movement and its Saudi- and Western-backed March 14 opponents - Salam said reaching agreement on a new system would take time.

"There is a possibility of a technical delay while a new electoral law is decided," Salam told Reuters a day after President Michel Suleiman asked him to form a new government.

The alternative of extending the existing parliament's life by a year or two was constitutionally risky, said Salam, while the worst-case scenario of a political "vacuum" would be a step towards the catastrophic conflict underway in Syria and suffered by Lebanon in its own 1975-1990 civil war.

"We experimented with this in the past when politics turned into political battles outside the democratic institutions and we paid a very heavy price, as others are paying today," the 67-year-old former culture minister said.