Region | Iraq
Election will set up balance of power
Fifteen million voters had the chance to participate in Iraq's first free parliamentary election.
- The Christian Science Monitor
- Published: 23:31 May 3, 2009
Baghdad: Fifteen million voters had the chance to participate in Iraq's first free parliamentary election.
Yesterday's election will establish the formal balance of political power in Iraq until 2010.
Sixty-one per cent of voters say the new government's top priorities should be infrastructure and economic development, according to a poll conducted by the US-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) released yesterday.
The new parliament will be in a position to make political compromises that could help bring peace to Iraq. But if the Shiite bloc, certain to be dominant, maginalises minority Sunni Arab politicians, the new parliament could add fuel to an already fierce rebellion.
US political influence will also inevitably decline as Iraqi politicians with popular support take their seats in the assembly and begin making decisions with far-reaching consequences about the role of Islam, revising the Constitution and sectarian power sharing.
Who is likely to come out ahead? The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a coalition of Shiite Islamist political parties, will probably do best. They took 51 per cent of the seats in January.
But this time, Iraq's Sunni Arabs, most of whom boycotted the last election, will inevitably claw some seats away from the Shiite Islamists and others.
There has also been a great deal of disappointment with the current UIA-led government, which will probably see some of their voters defect to other groups.
But simply based on Iraq's demographics and the way seats are apportioned 47 per cent of the seats are up for grabs in the Shiite south and in Baghdad (about 60 per cent Shiite) the UIA should end up with 40 to 50 per cent of the new parliament.
The ethnic Kurdish bloc will take somewhere between 13 per cent and 20 percent of the seats. The secular-leaning party of former Prime Minister Eyad Allawi took 14 per cent of the seats last time and he could do about the same again. Former US favourite Ahmad Chalabi is the wild card.
How much representation are Sunni Arabs likely to have?
Iraq's last election was organised as a single district, which meant that low turnout in Sunni Arab bastions like Anbar meant they ended up with no representatives.
This time, the three Sunni-dominated provinces (Anbar, Nineveh, and Salahaddin) are guaranteed 36 seats (13 per cent of the total), which makes turnout much less important.
What are the key issues that the new parliament will tackle over the next year?
Sunni Arabs will push to amend the constitution. Most of the disputes centre on how Iraq's oil wealth will be shared between the centre and the country's diverse regions.
The parliament will almost certainly debate asking for a US withdrawal when it sits. Finally, the new government will have to make progress on ending the war if it's to maintain public support.
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