The Iraqi parliamentary election results have been announced, and the news is good.
Iraq’s Shiite Muslim-based religious parties won 128 out of 275 seats in the December vote for a permanent parliament, requiring them to form a coalition government, according to results released today.
The United Iraqi Alliance, which controlled the transitional assembly with 146 seats, fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to form a government, according to a tally given by Safwad Rasheed Sidqi, a spokesman for the Independent Electoral Commission, in a televised news conference from Baghdad.
The minority Sunni Muslims, who boycotted the January 2005 election of the transitional assembly, made the biggest gains after their leaders encouraged participation in the Dec. 15 vote to gain representation in the new government. The National Concord Front won 44 seats and another Sunni-based party, the National Dialogue Front, won 11, Sidqi said.
“The elections have now confirmed that Sunnis are not the majority in Iraq and that they will not call the shots,” said Vali Nasr, professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. The Bush administration has expressed hope that the participation of Sunnis in the new government will help to stem a Sunni-led insurgency, allowing the withdrawal of U.S. troops to begin.
The Kurdish Alliance, which voted with the Shiite bloc in the current parliament, saw its presence reduced to 53 from 75. The rival Kurdish Islamic Party won five seats, a gain of three. Former premier Ayad Allawi’s secular Iraqi National List party took 25 seats, down from 40, according to the commission. Small parties won a total of 14 seats, according to the commission.
No date has yet been set for lawmakers to take their seats in the new Council of Representatives, formerly the National Assembly. Council members will serve four-year terms.
Politicians have four days to appeal the outcome, which were largely in line with the Dec. 21 preliminary returns. Officials then have 10 days to study any complaints before they certify the results.
Allawi and some Sunni politicians have already made complaints saying there was voting fraud and intimidation by Shiites. Sunnis dominated ousted President Saddam Hussein’s regime, which suppressed the Shiite majority and the ethnic Kurds.
Excellent. The best hope for Iraq right now is a continued pressure towards political compromise. Had the Shiites achieved a threshold allowing them to dictate the formation of the government, Iraq’s fledgling democracy may have taken quite a hit with non-Shiites as it struggles to continue its momentum forward.
The results are hopeful but must be kept in perspective.
“The fact that elections have gone forward now three times shows that the political process is taking root in Iraq and the insurgency is losing ground,” Michael Rubin, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington and a former adviser to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, said in a telephone interview. “That said, the insurgency is still going to be with us for years. There’s no magic formula to end it, and most insurgencies on average last 10 years.”
Quite right. There remains still a long row to hoe in Iraq, both politically and militarily, but progress is undeniable.