Additional Political Entities Approved for Elections

By Reidar Visser.

The following article was published by Reidar Visser, an historian of Iraq educated at the University of Oxford and currently based at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. It is reproduced here with the author’s permission. Any opinions expressed are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Iraq Business News.

Additional Political Entities Are Approved for the Iraq 2014 Parliamentary Elections

The Iraqi elections commission IHEC has now released a second PDF file of political entities approved to run in the April 2014 parliamentary elections. This list seems to be the final one after an initial list presented on the day when the deadline for registering parties expired seemed to contain some lacunae.

The list includes some big players that were absent in the first list. In addition to the Kurdish KDP, there is the Hiwar party of Saleh al-Mutlak from the Iraqiyya coalition and the Reform bloc of Ibrahim al-Jaafari, the former Shiite Islamist prime minister.

There are also further indications of persistent sub-division in Iraqiyya and the State of Law bloc of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki alike. Registering as separate tickets are Wathab Shakir (previously Unity of Iraq/Iraqiyya), Umar al-Jibburi (running independently in Kirkuk), Ali al-Sajri (previously Unity of Iraq) and Saad al-Mutalabi (reckoned as a Maliki ally).

Other Shiite players with their own entities include former oil minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum, Basra secularist and sometimes autonomist Wael Abd al-Latif, as well as the tribal figure Karim al-Muhammadawi (“Lords of the Marshes”) whose party, Hizbollah, is unconnected with its Lebanese namesake.

The next milestone is now the deadline for forming coalitions next week. It is quite remarkable that despite the regional and sectarian tensions brought about by the Syrian crisis, Iraqi Shiites are in no rush to form a unified alliance, quite unlike the situation in 2009.

As of today, it seems more likely that there will be a Maliki front and one or two challenging coalitions. Such a scenario would in itself send a positive message at a time when political violence continues at an elevated level.