Surprise move by Lebanon president

Beirut: A surprise move by President Michel Sulaiman to ally himself with the pro-western March 14 group cast heavy doubt on the Hezbollah-dominated opposition's ability to score big in Lebanon's national election on Sunday.

It is widely assumed that the elections will be decided by the Christian vote as Muslim voters are so polarised that most analysts agree results in the areas have already been decided, with each camp winning half the 64 seats allocated to Muslims in the 128 seat parliament.

Until Thursday, pollsters and analysts were expecting the opposition, led by Shiite group Hezbollah and Christian leader Michel Aoun, head of the popular Free Patriotic Movement (FPM), would win up to 65 seats, enough to win a majority.

March 14 spokesman Fares S'aid, a candidate running in the president's hometown Jbail, an ancient Maronite port north of Beirut, told reporters Sulaiman has lent his support to the three pro-March 14 candidates running against Aoun's list in the district.

The move by President Sulaiman, a popular figure among Lebanon's Christian community, is expected to tip the balance in favour of March 14, led by Sa'ad Hariri, in Jbail, a closely contested district.

The move was criticised strongly by the opposition, which has suspected that Sulaiman was secretly making deals with the Hariri camp.

"The president is risking losing his moral authority as a unifying figure," the pro-opposition newspaper As Safir said in a front page editorial. "We were hoping he would be the balancing act Lebanon so urgently needs to break the political impasse," it said.

The daily said the move came after US ambassador Michelle Sisson met with March 14 leaders at S'aid's house on Thursday night.

The presidential palace did not comment on the news but the move boosted the morale of the March 14 block, which earlier seemed to have resigned itself to the possibility of losing the elections.

"As far as things are going now, we expect to win big across Lebanon," MP Ammar Houri, a close aid to Hariri, said.

S'aid said the Lebanese voters are "determined not to hand the state of Lebanon over to Iran."

March 14 has described the elections as a struggle between their announced project of "building an independent democratic state" and what it claims as "the Hezbollah project of making Lebanon a proxy of Iran."