Protesters Rally near Baabda Palace, Several Hurt in Sidon Scuffle

Around 30 protesters on Friday staged a symbolic rally near the presidential palace in Baabda, demanding “the speeding up of the (binding) parliamentary consultations” necessary to form a new government.

“Consultations Now!” read the banners that they carried.

In a statement recited at the sit-in, the protesters said the new government should comprise competent figures from outside the political class, warning that the cabinet formation process should not take more than two weeks.

Another group of protesters meanwhile rallied outside al-Helou barracks in Corniche al-Mazraa to demand the release of an activist who was held in the morning in connection with the storming of the building of the Association of Banks in Lebanon in downtown Beirut. All others activists held over the move had been released earlier in the day.

The protesters later left the area after being told that the activist will be released later in the day. They had blocked the road outside the barracks in both directions.

In the southern city of Sidon, five protesters and two soldiers were meanwhile injured as the army intervened to reopen the blocked Elia roundabout, MTV said.

Lebanon’s banks reopened for the first time in two weeks Friday as the country began to return to normal following mass demonstrations for radical political change.

The unprecedented popular push to remove a political class seen as corrupt, incompetent and sectarian, had kept the country on lockdown since October 17.

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Saad Hariri submitted his government's resignation in response to pressure from the street, despite warnings from some of his senior coalition partners against such a move.

Hizbullah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah on Friday said that his party did not back the government's resignation.

Instead, it would have preferred quick reforms combatting corruption, Nasrallah said in a televised speech.

He called for a swift replacement, warning against the chaos caused by a void in government, and urged dialogue between parliament and representatives of the protest movement.

President Michel Aoun on Thursday said ministers in the next government should be picked for their skills, not their political affiliation, appearing to endorse demonstrators' demands for a government of technocrats.

Aoun has asked Hariri's government to stay on in a caretaker capacity until a new one can be formed, but Lebanon has entered a phase of acute political uncertainty, even by its own dysfunctional standards.

With a power-sharing system organized along communal and sectarian lines, the allocation of ministerial posts can typically take months, a delay Lebanon's donors say the debt-saddled country can ill afford.