Parliament to Resume Debate on Electoral Law

One can only wonder what the Iraqi supreme court members think of such abhorrent practices as those found in countries with a Westminster-inspired model of politics where winners typically take all in single-seat constituencies, and where the gap between the popular vote and the levels of party representation in national assemblies can be quite enormous as a consequence.

So far, it is mainly the State of Law coalition of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki that has voiced a bit of scepticism to the proposed change – it lost a considerable number of seats in the last provincial elections and at least some of them can be attributed to the new distribution mechanism. Most other Iraqi politicians seem to be happy with the change from largest remainder to Sainte Lague as such, and could in theory adopt that change without needing Maliki’s votes.

Unsurprisingly, however, once the election-law can had been opened earlier this year, other worms came out as well, with interested parties soon showing enthusiasm for more wide-ranging changes that have complicated the discussion of the election law changes in parliament. In particular, this relates to the Kurdish desire to go back to a single, nationwide electoral constituency, as was practised in the elections to the constituent assembly in January 2005.

Whereas that kind of move could perhaps be seen as a logical continuation of the supreme court’s insistence on hyper-proportionality, it is also the case that this kind of electoral system was widely discredited as one of the main factors behind the ethno-sectarian voting patterns seen in the first Iraqi elections.

Besides, if carried out with reference to the “principles of democracy” it would also imply that Israel, the Netherlands and Slovakia are among the the only incarnations of true democracy with their past and present examples of nationwide constituencies!

The Kurdish goal is obviously to pick up minority Kurdish votes in places where they are unlikely to win seats in other ways, especially in Baghdad. The small Iraqi communist party, which has limited numbers of enthusiastic adherents spread across the country is also in favour of this kind of arrangement – it was them who brought the initial challenge to the current system before the supreme court in 2010.