One day later,on 19 May, a second summit was held in Najaf. Barzani and Allawi did not elect to descend from their Arbilian heights but the political representation at the meeting was broadly identical to the 28 April summit. After that meeting another letter was sent to Jaafari. It contained a message to the Shia alliance that their previous (very jejune and non-committal) answer to the first ultimatum didn’t really address their concerns.
Accordingly, the Arbil signatories now asked Jaafari to identify a new prime minister candidate. It is widely understood that another deadline of 1 week was imposed, although this is missing in the draft of the letter that has been published.
This takes us on to Saturday 26 May as the new deadline for Maliki. Or, maybe we should say, “for the Arbil signatories”. Their bluff has already been called once and unless there is action this time (the second letter is more of an order than an ultimatum) doubts as to the parliamentary punch of their alliance will set in. Come Saturday and it will be crunch time. Already, there are rumours about a planned third summit of Maliki critics, this time in Mosul.
The problems are however about more than the sheer timing of the no confidence initiative. A second set of issues relates to the modalities for getting rid of Maliki envisaged in the proposal. In the leaked letter the Shia alliance is given the job of finding a suitable replacement, because “it is considered the framework for choosing the prime minister”. Not so fast, please!
The constitutional problems here are perhaps best understood through a little bit of prospective history writing. If indeed the Shia alliance votes to change Maliki, it will likely break apart. Now, if all or nearly ally of Maliki’s alliance defects in solidarity with him, the rump National Alliance is no longer the biggest bloc in parliament, and hence has no right to appoint the next PM. Nor has Iraqiyya, which has already dwindled in size to 85 deputies with indications it would be further reduced to at least 75 if an attempt were made to force out Maliki.
interesting analysis as always by reidar. but as usual he omits (or is not aware of) what's happening on the ground in Iraq. From Maliki's perspective he's already created a huge mass of ground support for himself by employing hundreds of thousands under his patronage (both shias and sunnis) and he's made alliances with mish'an juburi, harith al dhari and other well known sunni figures and setting himself up as an "iraqi strongman" (which he's selling to sunni-arabs). Maliki is attempting to move away from his "shia religious" background, and, in baghdad at least, he is now more popular than ever at "grass roots" level. A new election now would result in him cementing his grip on power by massively increasing his powerbase... it is also expected that Nujaifi would ally with "whoever is strongest" in a reshuffling of alliances and sadr's bluff would be called and he would fall in line. This would be a great loss for Allawi who's already lost a lot of the grass roots support that he earlier had, and he lost it to the "arab nationalists" who returned from exile (who are allied with Maliki).