A last minute deal…

Iraq’s 275-seat parliament voted through a version of an election law for the third time yesterday. The law was hammered through parliament close to midnight last night, within just minutes of a deadline set for a presidential council veto to the last version of the law, thus breaking a potentially crippling impasse. The polls were originally scheduled for 16 January but will be delayed now to allow the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) enough time carry out necessary preparations. It was unclear according to available reports how much support the law had garnered; however, parliamentary speaker Iyad al-Samarraie was quoted by Agence France-Presse (AFP) as saying "the law has been adopted with near-unanimity". The deal was reportedly brokered after intense mediation and pressure by U.S. and UN officials who have been working intensively behind the scenes to help Iraqi factions agree to a compromise.

….after a dangerously long delay

The law is an amended version of the first—rather than the second—proposal passed through parliament on 8 November, already then severely delayed. That version appeared at the time to satisfy demands from most Iraqi groups, particularly as it had been hammered out after negotiations within the Political Council for National Security, consisting of Iraq’s top political leadership and with intense U.S. mediation. That proposal managed to create some agreement on the issue of the disputed province of Kirkuk which had been the critical hurdle to a satisfactory law. It did so by finally concluding to use 2009 voter registrations but setting a one-year window for the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) which in collaboration with the UN would be allowed to investigate suspected major anomalies between the 2005 and 2009 registers. Shortly after the law was passed, Sunni Muslim Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi, one of three in the presidential council, issued a surprise veto of the law. The presidential council, which includes President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, and Adil Abd al-Mahdi, a Shi’a Muslim, has the right to veto legislation. Hashemi’s objections pertained to the allocation of seats for exiled Iraqis, and sought to increase that ratio from 5% to 10%. His objection was widely viewed as one attempting to shore up his chances within the Sunni constituency which form the majority of Iraqis who have fled the country since the toppling of the Saddam Hussein dictatorship under which Sunni Muslims held a privileged position despite their minority status.

Another surprise blow hit the 8 November law when the Kurds announced that they would pull the three northern provinces (Erbil, Sulaymania, and Duhok) in the Kurdistan Region out of the elections unless their allocated seats were revised to match the increases seen across the board in other provinces as a result of estimated population increases since the 2005 polls. After Hashemi’s veto, parliament went back to the drawing board and passed a second version of the law on 23 November, critically leaving out the amendments demanded by the vice president, but addressing the Kurdish demands. A Kurdish-Shi’a alliance of convenience backed the law, which based the allocation of seats on a 2.8% population increase each year for every province since 2005. Not surprisingly, Hashemi was ready to veto the law again. His second veto could theoretically have been overturned by a Kurdish-Shi’a convergence; however, it would have happened at the cost of potentially dangerous marginalisation of Sunnis in the political process, and would have thrown the legitimacy of the elections into serious doubt. A doubtful legitimacy on top of the expected delays to the polls also held the risk of significantly complicating the August 2010 withdrawal of U.S. combat troops—hence the intensified U.S. efforts to get a law passed as soon as possible.

Yesterday’s law was in contrast welcomed by Hashemi, who according to a New York Times report stood ready at the office of the parliamentary speaker to deliver his veto at midnight. AFP reported that Hashemi had welcomed the law and quoted him as saying: "I hope this is a step forward in the construction of the state of Iraq." The new law has kept the expansion of parliament from 275 seats to 325 to reflect population growth. In total, 310 of the seats will be directly allocated to the 18 provinces while the remaining seats will be allocated to minority groups and to other blocs that do not receive enough votes in any province to make it to parliament. Under the new law, the Kurdish will receive three additional seats in parliament—more than they had in the first law, but significantly less than they would have received under the second version. Furthermore, Hashemi’s original concern has been addressed, according to an analysis in www.historiae.org—voters from abroad will see their ballots cast as part of their home province, thus removing the dispute over quota allocations.

Outlook and Implications

The chaos surrounding the election law has widely been read as signs of dangerous sectarian and ethno-national divisions, ringing alarm bells for the prospects of a post-U.S. withdrawal Iraq. The experience largely illustrated that political factions are playing a zero-sum game. Every single significant law is considered by each group as being of existential importance—that is to say that losses incurred are often considered permanent and irreversible. The 2010 elections of course have an added importance given that they will vote into power the first post-U.S. withdrawal government if everything goes to plan. The stakes have thus been viewed as being extraordinarily high, as exemplified by the Kurdish threat to withdraw from the elections altogether should their demands not be met. The incoming government will tasked with dealing with a large number of big questions so far unresolved by the Nuri al-Maliki government, including the future of power sharing, decentralisation/centralisation, possible amendments to the federal constitution, not to mention the hydrocarbons laws—these are all issues that are not only extremely divisive but could spark dangerous clashes between constituent groups in the future.

However, for all the tumult that has been the past couple of months, Iraqi factions have proven that they are willing to compromise and that they are willing to lose some rather than throw the country into a constitutional vacuum. Importantly the agreement yesterday saw Kurds and Shi’a illustrate a preference for compromising and granting concessions to satisfy Sunni demands. The agreement also raises hopes for the future of Iraq’s nascent democratic institutions. Flawed as they undoubtedly are—and understandably so given that Iraq has no prior history of democratic, consensual, or even vaguely representative governance—they have nevertheless established the beginnings of potentially well-functioning power-sharing mechanisms. Indeed, much of the difficulties over the law come from the lack of well-defined, transparent and mutually acceptable political rules to guide decision-making, which in turn are the result of a weakly engrained political culture.

For now it remains to be seen what date will finally be agreed for the elections. Barring any other unexpected twists and turns however; it seems likely that the elections will be held with enough margins to avoid both a constitutional vacuum or a major downside effect to U.S. withdrawal. The United Nations last week recommended 27 February as a feasible date. Today the UN called on Talabani to set a date as soon as possible, raising pressures on the leadership to ensure political stability and confidence by moving matters forward urgently.

Global Insight (Reino Unido)