Lebanon Vote Produces Pro-Syrian Parliament : Election: The outcome sharpens Christian-Muslim differences. Maronites vow to oppose legislature.

Lebanon’s first national election in 20 years produced a pro-Syrian Parliament that appears to have sharpened Christian-Muslim differences.

Final results released Tuesday showed that three-fourths of the newly elected 128 lawmakers are politicians who have close ties to Syria or who have supported the presence of Syrian troops. That includes some Christians, who hold half the seats under an agreement that ended Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.

The last round of the three-stage election was held Sunday in turbulent southern Lebanon.

The election was boycotted by conservative Maronite Christians, who dominated Lebanon’s government before the civil war started in 1975. They argued that the presence of 40,000 Syrian soldiers in Lebanon would intimidate voters and produce a Parliament dominated by Syria.

Maronite leaders vowed to oppose the new Parliament, which one called a “new chapter of the civil war.”

Five seats in Kesrouan province allocated to the Christians remain vacant because of the boycott. Special elections will be held to fill those seats before the previous Parliament leaves office Oct. 15.

The Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement, participating in elections for the first time, won 16 seats.

That is unlikely to give the fundamentalist Shiite Muslim group great clout in Parliament, since two-thirds of the half-Christian, half-Muslim house are needed to approve laws.

But it gives them a parliamentary foothold for the first time and will alienate Christians who fear that Hezbollah’s gains give momentum to its aim of establishing an Islamic state in Lebanon.

The election brought allegations of fraud and provoked a political crisis for President Elias Hrawi’s Syrian-backed government, which was appointed to oversee an Arab League-brokered peace treaty that stopped the civil war in 1990.

Two Cabinet ministers lost their seats, while Prime Minister Rashid Solh got in with the barest of margins. Two other ministers, both Maronites, resigned to protest the government’s decision to go ahead with the election.

No one at this stage is predicting a resumption of the civil war, but tensions are rising.

Patriarch Nasrallah Sfeir, the Maronites’ religious leader, says his community will not recognize the new Parliament and will confront it through “passive resistance.”

Sfeir is not known as a radical, and his alliance with hard-line Maronite political leaders is a measure of Christian distrust of Syria’s influence.

Many expect the renewed tension to complicate U.S. efforts to mediate a Middle East peace settlement.

Syria, faced with Christian opposition, is less likely to withdraw its troops from Beirut and other Lebanese cities later this month as stipulated in the peace treaty.

That would lessen Israeli motivation to abandon a 440-square-mile “security zone” it has occupied in southern Lebanon since 1985 as a buffer against guerrilla attacks on its northern settlements.

The United States criticized the Lebanese elections, saying they were tainted by irregularities and do not reflect the opinions of all Lebanese.

But State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said that Washington nevertheless will continue to work with the government in Beirut.