Observers breathed a sigh of relief when Iraq’s provincial elections passed by with relatively little violence and gains by non-sectarian secular parties. The final tallies were confirmed today, but as results are assessed, and the political horse-trading and coalition-building begins, complaints of electoral fraud may yet spill over into violence.
The election was marred by low voter turnout, a consequence of confusion over voter registration, a complex electoral system, and dissatisfaction with the main religious blocs.
Votes from some 50 to 60 of 6,500 polling stations were invalidated after 1,400 complaints were investigated the electoral commission said. But fraud was not sufficiently widespread to declare the election invalid.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Dawa party took control of the southern oil hub of Basra and won governates from its Shia rival, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC), which is widely regarded as close to Iran. Dawa benefited from Maliki’s association with improved security – his electoral coalition was called “Rule of Law” – and the religious parties’ reputation for corruption and failure to deliver basic services.
Maliki’s allies won 28 out of 57 provincial council seats in Baghdad, a major fillip to the Prime Minister and his party ahead of parliamentary elections at the end of this year. The provincial elections suggest that the tectonic plates of Iraqi politics may be shifting, with more secular parties emerging at the expense of religious factions, and religious identity diminishing as the determining factor in political allegiance.
People voted on the issues rather than according to identity, and for individual candidates rather than anonymous lists. The poll represents an important step towards consolidating the country’s fragile democracy, but the real test will come with national legislative elections later this year.
Iraqis voted strongly against religious sectarian parties widely perceived to be corrupt and to have failed to deliver security and basic services. “No party in the elections ran with the slogan ‘Islam is the Solution’ since voters were much more interested in who could actually provide services at the local level,” writes the Washington Institute’s J. Scott Carpenter.
Dawa’s gains against the pro-Iranian SCIRI and Sunni parties’ success in Mosul, resisting perceived encroachment by minority Kurds, are enhancing a sense of Iraqi nationhood.
“We are witnessing the revival of Iraqi nationalism,” said Mustafa Alani, an analyst with the Dubai-based Gulf Research Center. “This has unified Iraqis against a number of threats.”
Adel Abdul Mehdi, Iraq’s vice president and a leading member of the Iranian-backed Shiite Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, seems to have learned the lesson. He insisted today that Islam is part of Iraq’s national philosophy but that political actors should be judged on actions not doctrine. “The struggle should be to improve people’s conditions and the services provided,” he said.
In the western province of Anbar, the big winners were the Sunni tribal leaders who switched allegiance from the insurgency to supporting U.S. efforts to combat al Qaeda and other salafist terrorists. Winner-takes-all attitudes tend to make Iraqi politics and zero-sum game. Unused to power-sharing arrangements with rivals, Sunni tribal leaders with the Awakening Councils in Anbar province could yet resort to violence, warns the NGO Coordination Committee in Iraq.
The election is also a tribute to the consistently courageous and unsung work of Iraqi democratic forces and civil society whose work in promoting civic awareness, women’s rights, labor unions, non-sectarian community associations and a plethora of other causes has helped nurture democratic institutions and a more tolerant political culture. In Anbar province, groups like the Iraqi Future Foundation have promoted non-sectarian civil activity, providing opportunities for youth in particular to become politically engaged outside sectarian or tribal structures.
The poll appears to have borne out Ahmed H. al-Rahim’s prediction in the Journal of Democracy that nationalism with “a strongly Shia Islamic tone” will dominate Iraqi politics for the foreseeable future. “The Shia now dominate the political process by virtue of their numbers, but if the new Iraq is to work, they will have to find a way to forge an Iraqi political identity that protects the rights of Sunni Arabs, Kurds, and other minorities, even as it remains premised on Shia predominance,” he concludes.
The danger is that, despite the gains registered by secular forces, sectarian politics will resurface in a different form. “Iraq was once defined by sectarian tensions pitting Shiite against Sunni,” writes Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Washington-based Project on Middle East Democracy. “Now, intra-Shiite competition may take greater precedence.”
A ‘fabulous bazaar‘ of 14,400 candidates representing 400 parties contested the poll but the election is likely to generate greater political consolidation since, in most provinces, leading parties will still need to make alliances in order to form majorities and take control over public services and budgets. The law benefits and provides an incentive to create larger parties since candidates who do not get a minimum number of votes are invalidated.
“It’s far too early to declare the elections a success,” writes Michael Knights, an associate fellow of The Washington Institute:
One need only look at the years following the 2005 elections to see that post-electoral assassinations against governors and police chiefs were routinely used as a means of altering the provincial balance of power. Based on that history, this time around individuals from disappointed or sidelined factions may also turn to violence.
So it is premature to conclude, after six years of fearsome violence, that democracy has prevailed, but Iraqis are at least able to exercise some of the freedoms for which so much has been sacrificed.
[...] lauded gains for secular forces in Iraq’s provincial elections last month were largely a function of the candidate-centric, [...]
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