Hariri to Nasrallah: Come at the ballot box

Former Prime Minister Saad Hariri said the response to Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah’s Friday speech, which he described as repetitive, should come at the polls. “Ballot boxes are the only response,” Hariri said on his Twitter feed when asked about a response to Nasrallah’s insinuation that the Future Movement does not want to hold elections and his assertion that his party’s arms will remain. In a speech Friday, Nasrallah said the Future Movement rejects an elections law based on proportional representation because it “insists on the domination of one party over the Sunni sect.” Hezbollah’s secretary general said that his party would retain its arms and implied that Hariri was using this issue as an excuse to try to avoid elections. Hariri has said that the 2013 parliamentary elections will be crucial for Lebanon, urging his supporters to vote the March 8 alliance out of the government. The Future Movement has also voiced opposition to proportional representation with bigger districts as an alternative to the 1960s elections law that stipulates small electoral districts, and has accused the March 8 coalition of devising a law based on its interests. In a Twitter chat with his followers, Hariri responded to a question of what he thought of his rival’s speech Friday by saying: “The same speech but on a different day,” seeming to indicate that he considers Nasrallah's speeches to differ little from one another. On Syria, Hariri, who has been out of the country for over a year, said if the Syrian regime had any self-confidence it would launch investigations into the series of bombings that hit Damascus and Aleppo in recent days.