Sunday, October 17, 2021

Some of the results from Iraq's elections

Last Sunday Iraq held elections.  Today, DT NEXT notes:

Judge Jalil Adnan Khalaf, chairman of the Board of Commissioners at IHEC, announced the results at a press conference, without giving details on the political entities or the numbers of seats won by major competing political blocs, Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.

The full results, released after a manual counting of the election votes, have no tangible change from the initial results announced on October 11.

"The full results are still preliminary and can be appealed to the Board of Commissioners, and the board's decisions about the appeals also can be appealed to the electoral judiciary board, whose decisions will be final," Khalaf said.


Per the election, what's the biggest political party in Iraq?  Reading what passes for coverage, you might think it's Moqtada al-Sadr's party.  Nope.  KURDISTAN 24 reports:


The Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) has emerged from Iraq's October parliamentary elections as the biggest party in Iraq following the Iraqi Independent High Election Commission's (IHEC) preliminary counting of all the votes. 

The KDP participated in the elections as a single party, not as part of any coalition, and won the most seats as a single party, making it the biggest single political party in all of Iraq. 

The Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's list won 73 seats in the election, but that included a number of different parties and politicians. 


Moqtada's alliances have pulled together 73 seats. That's not enough to form a government.  He'll need to reach out beyond his allian

ces.  Meanwhile, you can be sure Nouri al-Maliki still wants to be prime minister again.  His State of Law is said to have won 35 seats.  As demonstrated in the 2010 elections, Nouri doesn't need to wait for Moqtada and Moqtada has no claim on coalition building.  The person to build the coalition first can lay claim to determining the post of prime minister.  What of the presidency?  The Kurds, by custom, hold the post of President of Iraq.  Despite the PUK winning a smaller number of seats they have publicly proclaimed that they will hold onto the post of the presidency of Iraq -- whether that holds or not remains to be seen.  The PUK is stating they will nominate Barhim Saleh for a second term as president of Iraq. Mohammed al-Halbousi was the Speaker of Parliament until it dissolved ahead of the elections (it dissolved on October 7th).  Not only did al-Halbousi win his own district, his party, Taqadum, won 37 seats.  There have been rumors that Moqtada is courting him to be a part of the coalition Moqtada's attempting to put together.  On Saturday, al-Halbousi rejected rumors that he had formed an alliance with Moqtada.

 

The following sites updated over the weekend:



 

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