Berri says incumbent Parliament does not deserve to have term extended

Speaker Nabih Berri rejected any extension of Parliament's mandate, saying that the incumbent House does not deserve to have its term extended.

In remarks published in local newspapers Monday, Berri revealed that no progress has been reached so far over the presidential election, stressing that priority goes to electing a new head of state before holding the parliamentary polls.

The speaker said that staging the parliamentary polls based on the 1960 electoral law is deemed as a better option than extending the mandate of an out-of-service Parliament.

"Should elections fail to take place for a certain reason, I will push for backing the whole political system into a corner once the Parliament's term expires on November 20. I shall do so even if great vacuums falls in to leave the country without a president, a Cabinet and a Parliament," he warned. "The crisis would not be resolved if it did not grow."

Berri voiced relief over the return of former PM Saad Hariri, voicing readiness to cooperate with the latter so as to ward off terrorism and revitalize the state institutions' work.