"Popular Majority" Goes to... Opposition with 54.5% of Votes

Hussein Assi
Source: almanar.com.lb, 9-6-2009

"There is a difference between parliamentary majority and popular majority," Hizbullah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah recalled on Monday while commenting on the elections' outcome.

Yes, the parliamentary majority is not necessarily the same as the popular majority...

The Lebanese case seems to be the best example. Thanks to the electoral law, the majority of elected members of the Parliament does not necessarily represent all Lebanese. If another law was applied, other results would emerge.

To determine the popular majority, it's enough to count the number of votes each candidate has taken. The results show that the national opposition got 865,012 votes, thus 54.9% of overall votes. The parliamentary majority, in contrast, doesn't get more than 680,000 votes, this 45.1% of overall votes.