Region | Iraq
Early Iraq election results show Shiite strength
Early results from the count of votes in more than half Iraq's regions, including Baghdad, confirmed a strong showing for the ruling Shiite Islamist Alliance, figures from the Electoral Commission showed.
- Reuters
- Published: 23:31 May 3, 2009
Baghdad: Early results from the count of votes in more than half Iraq's regions, including Baghdad, confirmed a strong showing for the ruling Shiite Islamist Alliance, figures from the Electoral Commission showed on Monday.
The Alliance won 58 per cent of the vote in the capital, the biggest of 18 provinces and accounting for 59 of the 230 parliamentary seats allocated among the regions. A further 45 seats will be allocated according to shares of the national vote.
Trailing in second place in Baghdad was the Sunni Islamist- led Iraqi Accordance Front, on 19 per cent of the vote with 89 percent of 2.7 million ballots in the city counted, figures quoted by Electoral Commissioner Adel Al Lamy showed.
The secular, cross-sectarian list led by former prime minister Eyad Allawi, a Shiite, scored 327,174 votes, putting it on about 14 percent of those ballots already counted.
No other party won as much as two percent of the vote in the capital, Al Lamy's figures at a news conference indicated.
He gave provisional, partial results from nine other regions, mostly dominated by either Shiites or Kurds, which showed the Alliance and their Kurdish coalition allies dominating in their southern and northern heartlands respectively with most of the vote counted in those provinces.
In the poor southern province of Maysan, the Alliance scored more than 20 times the number of votes attributed to its closest rival, Allawi's Iraqi National List. Neither percentages nor a figure for total votes cast were available in the province.
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