BEIRUT - Lebanon's rival factions are close to agreement on a new unity government nearly two months after the March 14 alliance won parliamentary elections, speaker Nabih Berri said on Wednesday.
"I can affirm that the political process concerning the formation of the new government is complete," Berri told reporters after meeting President Michel Sleiman.
He said that the March 14 alliance led by prime minister designate Saad Hariri and the rival bloc led by Hezbollah had agreed on the sharing of portfolios.
But he added that the two sides were continuing to discuss which ministries each would get.
An official close to the Hezbollah alliance said it would get 10 ministries against 15 for Hariri's camp. The president would appoint another five ministers.
Since the June election, Hariri's camp has been engaged in tough negotiations with Hezbollah and its allies over their demands to retain the veto powers they enjoyed in the outgoing unity government formed last year.
The March 14 alliance is strongly opposed to those powers.
The winning alliance headed by Hariri won 71 seats in the 128-member parliament in the election against 57 for the opposition led by Hezbollah.
The Hezbollah opposition had actually secured the majority (52%) of the votes in Lebanon, but could not secure a majority of Parliamentary seats (it won 45%) because of the nature of the sectarian government system in the country.
Israel waged a bloody 34-day war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 after Hezbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers in a deadly cross-border raid that aimed to free Lebanese soldiers from Israeli prisons. The bodies of the soldiers were returned in a prisoner swap.
The war claimed the lives of more than 1,200 people in Lebanon, most of them civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, most of them soldiers.
Hezbollah, originally a resistance group formed to counter an Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, had forced the Israeli military out of Lebanon in 2000. Israel, however, continues to occupy the Lebanese Shabaa Farms.
Israeli flights over Lebanon occur on an almost daily basis and are in breach of UN Security Council resolution 1710, which in August 2006 ended the war.
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