Policies
Karami was a strong proponent of increasing political power of Lebanon's Muslim community, which in his time increased to outnumber the Christian population for the first time in Lebanese history, causing major ripples in the social fabric of the country. He attempted, without success, to gain greater representation for Muslims in the National Assembly, where they were allocated 45 percent of the seats, a figure that was not adjusted to take account of changing demographics. In 1976, Karami helped broker an agreement to provide for equal parliamentary representation of Christians and Muslims, but this agreement was never implemented. One concession that was made by Christian politicians was to allow legislation signed by the President to be countersigned by the Prime Minister, from 1974 onwards, giving the Prime Minister (always a Sunni Muslim) an effective veto.
Karami was a part of the Islamic Leftist faction in Lebanese politics. During the 1950s, he was a political follower of the Pan-Arabism of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser. He was first appointed Prime Minister by President Camille Chamoun on 19 September 1955. By the following year, however, he had seriously fallen out with Chamoun over the latter's refusal to sever diplomatic relations with the western powers that had attacked Egypt in the 1956 Suez Crisis of 1956. He again opposed Chamoun in the 1958 Lebanon Crisis, a Nasserist uprising with considerable support in the Muslim community which erupted in May 1958 and attempted to topple the government and join Egypt and Syria in the new United Arab Republic. By September, when Chamoun had quelled the uprising with the aid of United States Marines, Karami formed a government of national unity under the new President, Fuad Chehab.
Read more about this topic: Rashid Karami
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