Parliamentary elections were held in Iraq on 12 May 2018.[4] The elections decided the 329 members of the Council of Representatives, the country's unicameral legislature, who in turn will elect the Iraqi President and Prime Minister.[5] The Iraqi parliament ordered a manual recount of the results on 6 June 2018.[6] On 10 June 2018, a storage site housing roughly half of the ballots from the May parliamentary election caught fire.[7]
Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, is a country in Western Asia, bordered by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, Kuwait to the southeast, Saudi Arabia to the south, Jordan to the southwest and Syria to the west. The capital, and largest city, is Baghdad. Iraq is home to diverse ethnic groups including Arabs, Kurds, Assyrians, Turkmen, Shabakis, Yazidis, Armenians, Mandeans, Circassians and Kawliya. Around 95% of the country's 37 million citizens are Muslims, with Christianity, Yarsan, Yezidism and Mandeanism also present. The official languages of Iraq are Arabic and Kurdish.
The Council of Representatives is the unicameral legislature of the Republic of Iraq. It is currently composed of 329 seats and meets in Baghdad inside the Green Zone.
In government, unicameralism is the practice of having one legislative or parliamentary chamber. Thus, a unicameral parliament or unicameral legislature is a legislature which consists of one chamber or house.
The elections took place six months after a non-binding independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan, in which 93% voted in favour of independence. In retaliation, the Iraqi government led by Haider al-Abadi closed Erbil International Airport, seized control of all border crossings between Kurdistan and neighbouring countries and, with the help of the Hashd al-Shaabi militias, militarily seized control of disputed territories, including the oil-rich city of Kirkuk. Nonetheless, Iraqi politicians called for dialogue with the Iraqi Kurdistan government and force them to formally annul the results.[8]
Haider Jawad Kadhim al-Abadi; Arabic: حيدر جواد كاظم العبادي, born 25 April 1952) is an Iraqi politician who was Prime Minister of Iraq from September 2014 until October 2018. Previously he served as Minister of Communication from 2003 to 2004, in the first government after Saddam Hussein was deposed.
Erbil International Airport, is the main airport of the city of Erbil in Iraq. It is administered by the Iraqi Government under a committee consisting of the Prime Minister of Iraqi Kurdistan, Nechervan Idris Barzani, and is one of two international airports, with a third in Duhok being under construction. The new modern airport opened in 2010. The airport has one of the longest runways in the world (4800m).
The elections were originally scheduled for September 2017, but were delayed by six months due to the civil war with the Islamic State which ended in December 2017 with the recapture of their remaining territories. The largest Sunni Arab majority coalition, the Muttahidoon (Uniters for Reform), called for a further six month's delay to allow displaced voters to return to their homes.[9] A Sunni Arab MP described holding the elections at this time as a "military coup against the political process".[10] However, the Supreme Court ruled that delaying the elections would be unconstitutional.[11]
The Iraqi Civil War was an armed conflict which began in January 2014 and ended in December 2017. In 2014, the Iraqi insurgency escalated into a civil war with the conquest of Ramadi,Fallujah, Mosul, Tikrit and in the major areas of northern Iraq by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. At its height, ISIL held 56,000 square kilometers of Iraqi territory, containing 4.5 million citizens. This resulted in the forced resignation of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, as well as a massive airstrike campaign by the United States and at least a dozen other countries, participation of American and Canadian troops in ground combat operations, a $3.5 billion U.S.-led program to rearm the Iraqi Security Forces, a U.S.-led training program that provided training to nearly 200,000 Iraqi soldiers and police, the participation of Iranian troops including armored and air elements, and military and logistical aid provided to Iraq by Russia. On 9 December 2017, Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi announced victory over ISIL, though others warned that they expected ISIL to fight on via an insurgency, and by other means. ISIL switched to guerrilla 'hit and run' tactics in an effort to undermine the Iraqi government's effort to eradicate them.
The Uniters for Reform Coalition is a Sunni political coalition in Iraq.
Open list describes any variant of party-list proportional representation where voters have at least some influence on the order in which a party's candidates are elected. This as opposed to closed list, which allows only active members, party officials, or consultants to determine the order of its candidates and gives the general voter no influence at all on the position of the candidates placed on the party list. Additionally, an open list system allows voters to select individuals rather than parties. Different systems give voter different amounts of influence. Voter's choice is usually called preference vote.
Party-list proportional representation systems are a family of voting systems emphasizing proportional representation (PR) in elections in which multiple candidates are elected through allocations to an electoral list. They can also be used as part of mixed additional member systems.
Iraq presently consists of 19 governorates, also known as "provinces". As per the Iraqi constitution, three or more governorates can join to form an autonomous region. Baghdad and Basra are the oldest standing administrative regions of Iraq while In 2014 the decision was made to create the Halabja Governorate out of the Halabja District of Sulaymaniyah Governorate.
In January, the Supreme Court ruled that the representation for Yazidis should be increased, although it is unclear whether this change will be implemented in time for these elections.[16]
The United States of America (USA), commonly known as the United States or America, is a country composed of 50 states, a federal district, five major self-governing territories, and various possessions. At 3.8 million square miles, the United States is the world's third or fourth largest country by total area and is slightly smaller than the entire continent of Europe's 3.9 million square miles. With a population of over 327 million people, the U.S. is the third most populous country. The capital is Washington, D.C., and the largest city by population is New York City. Forty-eight states and the capital's federal district are contiguous in North America between Canada and Mexico. The State of Alaska is in the northwest corner of North America, bordered by Canada to the east and across the Bering Strait from Russia to the west. The State of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific Ocean. The U.S. territories are scattered about the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, stretching across nine official time zones. The extremely diverse geography, climate, and wildlife of the United States make it one of the world's 17 megadiverse countries.
Sweden, officially the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Scandinavian Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north and Finland to the east, and is connected to Denmark in the southwest by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund, a strait at the Swedish-Danish border. At 450,295 square kilometres (173,860 sq mi), Sweden is the largest country in Northern Europe, the third-largest country in the European Union and the fifth largest country in Europe by area. Sweden has a total population of 10.2 million of which 2.5 million has a foreign background. It has a low population density of 22 inhabitants per square kilometre (57/sq mi). The highest concentration is in the southern half of the country.
Turkey, officially the Republic of Turkey, is a transcontinental country located mainly in Western Asia, with a smaller portion on the Balkan Peninsula in Southeast Europe. East Thrace, located in Europe, is separated from Anatolia by the Sea of Marmara, the Bosphorous strait and the Dardanelles. Turkey is bordered by Greece and Bulgaria to its northwest; Georgia to its northeast; Armenia, the Azerbaijani exclave of Nakhchivan and Iran to the east; and Iraq and Syria to the south. Istanbul is the largest city, but more central Ankara is the capital. Approximately 70 to 80 per cent of the country's citizens identify as Turkish. Kurds are the largest minority; the size of the Kurdish population is a subject of dispute with estimates placing the figure at anywhere from 12 to 25 per cent of the population.
Election day
Iraqi President Fuad Masum shows his inked finger after casting ballot at the central polling station in the Green Zone of Baghdad, capital of Iraq, May 12, 2018.
A curfew was declared by prime minister Al-Abadi from midnight Friday to 7 pm Saturday in all governorates except Baghdad, where the curfew started at noon Friday.[18] A 24 hour closure of all airports and other border crossing was also implemented. The Iraqi airspace was open later on the day as well as the lifting of the curfew.[19] Election day in Iraq was extremely successful from a security aspect, as no attacks were registered anywhere in the country.[20]
As of 26 December 2017, a total of 204 parties had registered to contest the elections.[23] The deadline for registering coalitions was 11 January 2018.[24] A total of 27 coalitions were registered by the deadline, grouping 143 political parties, with registered parties not part of a coalition also free to contest separately.[25]
The ruling State of Law Coalition, which won the last election in 2014 with 92 seats, contested the election with two separate coalitions. Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi entered the election as head of a coalition called "Victory" (a reference to the victory over Daesh); his predecessor, Vice President Nouri al-Maliki, headed the State of Law list.[26][27] Members of the Dawa Party, which they both come from, were free to support either list.[28]
Leading members of the Hashd al-Shaabi (Popular Mobilization Forces), mainly Shiite Arab militias who fought alongside the Iraqi army to defeat Daesh from 2014 to 2017, formed an alliance to contest the election. The Fatah Alliance included the Badr Organisation, Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, Kata'ib Hezbollah and Kata'ib al-Imam Ali—all key components of the Hashd. The Badr Organisation, headed by Hadi Al-Amiri, which had 22 seats, was previously part of the ruling State of Law Coalition from which it announced its withdrawal in December 2017.[29][30] The Fatah Alliance agreed to run jointly with al-Abadi's Nasr al-Iraq (Victory of Iraq) list, but the agreement fell apart after only 24 hours, reportedly over Abadi's conditions.[31][32]
Ammar al-Hakim, the leader of the Citizen Alliance, the third largest bloc in parliament, announced in July 2017 that he was leaving the veteran Shiite Islamist party, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq -– which he had led since the death of his father, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim –- and forming a new "non-Islamic national movement" called the National Wisdom Movement (al-Hikma). All but five of the 29 MPs from the Citizens Alliance joined Al-Hikma.[33] The remaining members of the Citizen Alliance joined the Fatah Alliance.[34]
Muqtada al-Sadr announced a joint list with the Iraqi Communist Party, called the Alliance towards Reforms. This built on previous collaboration with the Communists since 2016, when they held joint protests in Baghdad against corruption and sectarianism in government.[24][35]
Kurdistan Region
Within the Kurdish parties, there had been significant changes since the previous election with the death of both Jalal Talabani, the long-time leader of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the second largest party, and the opposition leader Nawshirwan Mustafa. In September 2017, Barham Salih, a former Prime Minister of Iraqi Kurdistan and deputy leader of the PUK, announced that he was leaving the party and forming a new opposition party—the Coalition for Democracy and Justice. The party was seen to have the potential to change the Kurdish political landscape. He said he hoped to gather all the other opposition parties, including Gorran and Komal, to challenge the governing KDP–PUK alliance.[36] The three parties formed a coalition called Nishtiman (Homeland) to run in the elections.[24] The ruling KDP–PUK alliance have agreed to run again as a single list and all the Kurdish parties in Kirkuk have discussed running as a single list.[37] However, the KDP announced they would boycott elections in Kirkuk and other areas they described as "under military occupation".[38]
Within the nonsectarian parties who aim to establish a civil state, the main alliance formed is the Civilized Alliance,[40][41] led by Faiq Al Sheikh Ali, which currently has 4 seats. The alliance consists of four liberal, non-sectarian, national parties, the People's Party for Reform, the Al-Etifak National Party, the National Civil Movement and Iraq's National Movement, and includes a number of independent figures. The Civil Democratic Alliance are also running in the elections as another major civil party.[42]
Christian parties
Of the 329 seats in parliament, five are reserved for the country's Christian minority. One reserved seat is allotted for each of five governorates: Baghdad, Duhok, Erbil, Kirkuk and Nineveh.[43] At the time of voting, only about 200,000 Christians remained in the country.[44]
Attacks
In early May 2018, ISIL claimed to have assassinated Faruq Zarzur al-Juburi, a candidate in the Iraqi elections. The attack reportedly took place in Mosul, outside al-Juburi's house.[45] This was later on proven to be false; due to a family dispute, the candidate was killed by his son.[46]
On election day, a roadside bomb in Kirkuk killed six members of Tribal Mobilization (ar) (a pro-government Sunni tribal force) and injured three police officers.[47]
One Iraqi border guard was killed by a bomb in the outskirts of Khanaqin in Diyala on 13 May.[48]
Two offices linked to Muqtada al-Sadr in Maysan were bombed on 15 May but there were no casualties since both offices were empty at the time.[49][50] It is still unclear whether the attacks were a response to the parliamentary gains in the election made by Sadr's coalition.[51]
On 16 May, a polling station in Kirkuk was reportedly under siege by gunmen pressuring them to change the results after the PUK was indicated to have won the province.[52]
Results
After the High Electoral Commission announced the results, there were claims of widespread fraud linked to the electronic counting of votes. The Council of Representatives held an emergency session and passed an amendment to the electoral law that cancelled the votes of internally-displaced and overseas voters and mandated a full manual recount for all other votes.
The Commission appealed to the Supreme Court. In a ruling on 21 June, the court upheld the full manual recount but struck down the cancellation of internally-displaced and overseas voters.[53] The final results were released on 9 August, with only minor changes affecting five candidates and two parties.[54]
Al-Sadr announced on 12 June that he had formed an alliance with Fatah, while maintaining an alliance with Al-Wataniya.[75] Prime Minister Abadi later met with Al Sadr on 23 June.[76] Al Sadr afterwards announced he had formed "a cross-sectarian, cross-ethnic alliance" with Abadi and that it would speed up the formation of a new government.[76] Abadi also announced that the new alliance between his Victory Alliance's and Al Sadr's Alliance towards Reforms "is not in contrast to any other alliances either of the two lists have previously entered into with other blocs, rather, it flows in the same direction and same principles."[76]
The final results of the election were announced on 9 August, starting the process to form the government.[54] Parliament convened on 3 September, but were unable to elect a speaker due to rivalries between two blocs who both claimed to be the largest coalition, entitled to nominate the Prime Minister. al-Abadi presented an alliance with Saairun, Wataniya, Hikma and other smaller lists who between then held a majority of seats. However, Fatah also claimed to have a majority, based on an alliance with State of Law and with members of Abadi's coalition who had defected.[77]
Two weeks later parliament reconvened and elected a speaker in a secret ballot, with candidates from each of the rival blocs. Muhammad al-Halbusi, a Sunni Arab (as per the Iraqi tradition of muḥāṣaṣah) but backed by Fatah was elected.[78]
At the same time, violent protests occurred in Basra and other cities in the south over polluted water - which had hospitalised tens of thousands of people - and the lack of reliable electricity. Religious leaders called for a new Prime Minister who hadn't been in government before. Abadi announced on 13 September 2018 that he would respect this call and not run for a second term as prime minister.[79]
The vote for the President took place on 2 October. Previously, the president had always been a member of the second-largest Kurdish party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, under an agreement with the Kurdistan Democratic Party whereby the KDP would be president of Iraqi Kurdistan. However, the KDP fielded a separate candidate, Fuad Hussein, insisting that they had the right to the Presidency as the largest party. Both candidates went to a vote in the parliament, with the PUK's Barham Salih winning. He immediately nominated independent Shi'ite Adel Abdul Mahdi, a former oil minister seen as acceptable to all parties and to both Iran and the United States, as Prime Minister-designate.[80]
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