Iraq: The State of the Elections (Parker and Lynch)

With the full results from Iraq's national election due to be released today, two summaries of the current political situation from Ned Parker of the Los Angeles Times and from Marc Lynch:

Parker

With final results in Iraq's election set to be announced Friday, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and his secular rival, former Premier Iyad Allawi, are neck in neck in the race to form the next national government.

LATEST UPDATE Iraq Special: The Outcome of the Election — Uncertainty

Whether the results will even stand has been clouded by Maliki's allegations of fraud and a demand for a recount.

Below are the US military's estimates on the final results based on the counting of 95 percent of the votes in the March 7th national election. [Full images can be accessed from Parker's article.] The projections put Maliki's State of Law coalition at 90 seats and Allawi's Iraqiya list at 87 seats.



Maliki's Shiite rivals in the Iraqi National Alliance are projected to win 70 seats and the main Kurdish blocs a total of 56 seats. It is a far-from-comfortable majority for forming the next government and would leave Maliki vulnerable to being unseated.

Lynch:

The final results of Iraq’s elections are yet to be released, but with 95 per cent of the votes counted, it is clear that the contest is a dead heat between the two leading parties – the State of Law list headed by Nouri al Maliki, Iraq’s current prime minister, and the Al Iraqiya list headed by former prime minister Iyad Allawi.

The eventual winner will have the first shot at forming a coalition government, but these negotiations are widely expected to take several weeks, and Iraq’s next government is unlikely to be seated before May. While there is still a real risk that allegations of fraud, or a prolonged electoral deadlock, could trigger contentious or violent protests, the vote in Iraq can still avoid the ignominious fate of recent “decisive elections” in the region, like those in Afghanistan and Iran.

Contrary to the persistent worries of outside observers, Iraq is not unravelling. Indeed, the results suggest that Iraqi nationalism is becoming a more potent force than sectarianism and that most voters have no trouble accepting a strong central government. Both of the leading lists – al Maliki’s Shiite-dominated “party of state” and Allawi’s avowedly nonsectarian alliance – claimed to represent Iraqi nationalism, and both potential prime ministers have reputations for the forceful exercise of state power.
Meanwhile, lists identified with sectarian, Iranian or American interests fared poorly. Prominent symbols of the American-backed Sunni “Awakening” in Anbar ­Province were wiped out in the elections, capturing only a handful of seats. Within the Shiite Iraqi National Alliance, candidates affiliated with Muqtada al Sadr far outpaced those hailing from the Islamic Supreme Council in Iraq; while both have ties to Iran, where al Sadr himself resides, ISCI is closer to the leadership in Tehran while the Sadrists tend to be more deeply rooted in the Shiite underclass and to voice a more pugnacious Iraqi nationalism. Mithal al Alousi, a pro-American politician known for his outspoken views, failed to win a single seat. And a number of leading members of the post-2003 ruling elite were undone by the open-list voting system, which allowed Iraqis to select their preferred candidates from among each electoral list rather than accepting the rankings carefully negotiated in advance by party leaders.

The remarkable performance of the Iraqiya list, which is headed by Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, and includes Tareq al Hashemi, the current Sunni vice president, and a number of other leading Sunni political figures, has been the greatest surprise of the election.

Read rest of article....

Iraq: So What Do the Elections Mean (So Far)?

As we noted yesterday, the Sunday vote in Iraq now gives way to party propaganda and behind-the-scenes haggling and power plays, although a lot of the manoeuvres will be reshaped by the preliminary outcome when it is announced later this week.



Yesterday Iraq's electoral commission reported that 62.4 percent of eligible voters had cast ballots, with rates of 50 to 80 percent across the provinces. Still too early to tell where the outcome is heading, amidst conflicting (and self-serving) claims from the parties.

On Monday, Marc Lynch offered this sharp, incisive reading, which I think holds for the post-election period as well as for the vote. This line jumped out at me --- "[A] headline of the Iraqi election campaign has to be the overwhelmingly nationalist tone of all major politicians and the marginal American role in the process":

Iraq's election day went off remarkably well.



Despite some scattered and tragic violence, there was nothing like the kind of devastating violence threatened by a few insurgent groups and only scattered reports of problems in the electoral process. The de-Baathification shenanigans of Chalabi and al-Lami did some long-lasting damage to the credibility of state institutions and the rule of law, but not enough to cripple the elections. The relatively calm election day was overseen, it's worth emphasizing, by Iraqi security forces and not by U.S. troops -- something which I was often informed, over the last year, couldn't possibly happen. It did. This is simply excellent news, and a credit to the emerging capability of the Iraqi state. So now that election day is past, what now?

First, don't rush to speculate on who won or what it means. All the Iraqi lists are loudly claiming victory, but the truth is that no official (or even unofficial) results yet seem to exist. The anecdotal evidence still points to the pre-election speculation -- [current Prime Minister Nuri] Maliki on top, [Ayad] Allawi a strong second, the ISCI/Sadrist Shi'a list fading -- but it's only anecdotal. It does make a difference who comes out on top, and who becomes Prime Minister - Maliki and Allawi, for instance, would have very different styles, as would Chalabi or some such. But at the same time, there's almost certainly going to be a coalition of some kind (fully inclusive or otherwise) and the differences probably won't be as stark as some people expect.

Everybody has been predicting that the post-election coalition maneuvering will be long and painful, and could create the kind of security and political vaccuum which caused so many problems in the first half of 2006. I suspect that this is wrong. Iraqis learned from that experience, and they've been spending the last half-year gaming out coalition scenarios. I think that we'll see some intense political jockeying, with escalating warnings of disaster which lead to some worried op-eds about how the U.S. must get involved to resolve the conflict. And then it will resolve itself, likely within a month. I could be wrong -- lord knows, Iraq is hard to predict -- but that's my sense. Check back in a month and we'll see.

The other main headline of the Iraqi election campaign has to be the overwhelmingly nationalist tone of all major politicians and the marginal American role in the process. The election campaign (as opposed to the results, which we still don't know) showed clearly that Iraqis are determined to seize control of their own future and make their own decisions. The U.S. ability to intervene productively has dramatically receded, as the Obama administration wisely recognizes. The election produced nothing to change the U.S. drawdown schedule, and offered little sign that Iraqis are eager to revise the SOFA [Status of Forces Agreement] or ask the U.S. to keep troops longer. Iraq is in Iraqi hands, and the Obama administration is right both to pay close attention and to resist the incessant calls to "do more." This doesn't mean ignoring Iraq -- the truth is, the Obama administration has been paying a lot more attention to Iraq than the media has over the last year. It means moving to develop a normal, constructive strategic relationship with the new Iraqi government, with the main point of contact the Embassy and the private sector rather than the military, and adhering in every way possible to the SOFA and to the drawdown timeline.

Follow the Middle East Channel for a lot of analysis of the Iraqi election in the coming days!

The Day After the Iraq Election: "Politics Takes Over"

1220 GMT: The excellent analyst Marc Lynch has just made the immediate point, "All the Iraqi lists appear to be claiming victory. I'd wait for official results, which will be a while." His comment comes a few hours after a CNN correspondent pondered, "Each TV station corresponding to each political bloc saying that they are the winners...hmmm...."

The “Violent Semi-Peace”: Elections in Iraq, Escalation in Afghanistan
Iraq LiveBlog: Election Day

This is the real politics of Iraq, a day after the headlines of bombings and "democracy". With no party in the position to establish a national majority and indeed, outside Kurdistan, even a regional dominance, the negotiations, coercions, and manipulations take over, even before the preliminary results are announced on Thursday.

In Kurdistan, there is an intriguing contest between the Kurdistan List --- made up of the Kurdistan Democratic Party, led by Kurdish Prime Minister Masoud Barzani and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan led by Iraq President Jalal Talabani --- and the Gorran Party, established to break the stranglehold of the KDP and PUK on Kurdish politics. An activist says that Gorran narrowly won in the city of Suleymaniyah and lost in province of the same name; however, Gorran is claiming fraud in the provincial vote. Another activist says that Gorran has also secured seats in Diyala, Mosul, and Salahaddin; however, the Kurdistan List has triumphed by a 2:1 margin in Erbil.


Juan Cole offers an overview:

Sunday's vote for a new parliament in Iraq on Sunday could result in two possible geopolitical futures for that country.

If the Iraqi National List of former interim prime minister Iyad Allawi did well enough to come to power, that would reorient Iraq radically, taking it back in some ways to 2002. Allawi's coalition is largely made up of Arab nationalists who would see Iran as a threat and would ally with Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt. Baghdad would go back to helping contain Iran. Sunni Arab radicalism would likely be tamped down. For Washington, it would be the best of all possible worlds-- a pro-American Iraqi government headed by a former CIA asset that is willing to help pressure Iran for the West. Internally, an Allawi government that depends heavily on Sunni Arab constituencies would find it difficult to compromise with the Kurds on the disputed province of Kirkuk or on Kurdistan's interests in Ninevah and Diyala, setting the stage for a potential civil war.

If, on the other hand, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki manages to hold on to power, Iraq will remain firmly in Shiite hands, and will likely have warm relations with Tehran. Certainly, Baghdad would have no interest in helping contain Iran. Relations with Saudi Arabia will continue to be bad. As the US withdraws, Iranian influence could ramp up and fill the vacuum. Al-Maliki also has his tensions with the Kurds, but his relatively bad relations with the Sunni Arabs of Mosul mean that he could deal with the Kurds without incurring much more enmity from the Sunni Arabs than he already does.

So those are the two possibilities facing Iraq-- roughly, reintegration into the Sunni-dominated Arab League, or an Iran alliance. In a way, the choices replicate those of the 1930s, Iraq's first decade of independence from Britain. The government of PM Hikmat Sulaiman in 1936-1937 rejected Arab nationalism and developed good relations with Iran. Sulaiman was a Turkmen and he served under the military dictatorship of Bakr al-Sidqi, a Kurd. There is a sense in which the al-Maliki-Talibani condominium of the past 4 years revives many geopolitical themes of the Sulaiman-Sidqi period. Their dire enemies were the Arab nationalist officers, who were focused on Palestine and felt more kinship with Egypt than with Iran. Allawi is more in that Arab nationalist tradition, though he is by heritage a Shiite.

Here is why I think the return of Allawi as prime minister is unlikely despite an apparently strong showing for his party in the elections.

The Saudi-owned pan-Arab London daily "The Middle East" [al-Sharq al-Awsat] is reporting that its correspondents are conveying an (unscientific) impression from exit polling that the Iraqi National List of Allawi is doing extremely well in the Sunni Arab provinces, and is running a strong second in the Shiite south (Kurds in the north typically vote only for Kurdish parties.) The report is rather breathless and I think the numbers are almost certainly exaggerated. It also alleges that current prime minister Nuri al-Maliki's State of Law coalition is getting 40% of votes in the Shiite south, which may be true for Baghdad and Basra (it did nearly that well in the provincial elections last year), but it would represent a major change in voting patterns in rural Shiite provinces such as Maysan and Dhi Qar.

Even so, without an unexpected landslide in the south, Allawi is unlikely to become prime minister. He will need 163 seats out of 325 to govern, and there is probably no way for his coalition to deliver them. Even leading lists will likely get less that 100 seats, and so will need post-election coalition partners. That small parties willing to ally with Allawi would have as many as 75 seats to deliver to him seems unlikely. So he'd have to deal with the big three--the State of Law, the National Iraqi Alliance, and the Kurdistan Alliance (or the Kurdistan parties generally). But they might well decline to deal with him, and could seek to exclude him instead.

Al-Maliki's State of Law list campaigned hard against the resurgence of Baathism, and Allawi and many on his list are ex-Baathists, so al-Maliki would have to eat a lot of crow to accept a junior position in an Allawi government. It seems unlikely, even if politics makes for strange bedfellows.

The Shiite religious parties grouped in the National Iraqi Alliance are said by the exit polls (for the little they are worth) to be coming in third. They are also highly unlikely to ally with Allawi, since he is an old-time CIA asset and ex-Baathist whose interim government was hostile to the Shiite religious authorities and to Iran.

Allawi appears to be attracting strong support in Ninevah Province in the north, which returned an Arab nationalist party in the provincial elections of 2009. Ninevah has a Sunni Arab majority and a Kurdish minority, but the Kurds had been dominant in provincial government and the security forces because the Sunnis had sat out the provincial elections of January 2005. There is very bad blood between the Arabs and Kurds in Ninevah.

So Allawi will find it difficult to ally with the Kurds while keeping his Sunni Arab nationalist base. But not only would he need the Kurds to get a simple majority if the other two big coalitions spurned him, but it will take a multi-party coaltion of 215 or so members of parliament to elect a president.

Whereas the numbers don't easily add up for Allawi, it seems likely that the State of Law, the Shiite fundamentalist parties of the NIA, and some smaller parties willing to join the two of them, could easily get to over 163, and they have a proven ability to work with the Kurds and independents to get to 215. In order to block this scenario, Allawi's list would have to get well over 100 seats and be united and disciplined.

As I suggested Sunday, one price al-Maliki might have to pay to gain the National Iraqi alliance as a partner is to agree to accelerate the US troop withdrawal (a key demand of the Sadr faction in the NIA).

Whatever the outcome of the voting (and a projected result based on one-third of the votes is scheduled to be announced on Wednesday), it may not be easily accepted by the losers. There is tremendous anxiety in Iraq about the possibility of ballot fraud in the wake of Sunday's parliamentary elections. The Iranian Arabic-language satellite station al-Alam reported on Sunday that the Shiite fundamentalist Sadr movement was alarmed to hear that ballot boxes were being transported from the provinces to Baghdad by US troops, and insisted that the US be kept away from those boxes. (They must have heard about Florida in 2000). Allawi is on Al Jazeera complaining about irregularities. He didn't say this, but campaigning continued through Sunday althought it was supposed to be forbidden after Friday late afternoon. In Basra, al-Hayat reports that anti-Allawi pamphlets were dropped by helicopter on Saturday and Snday.

Bottom line, another Allawi prime ministership is unlikely even if his list turns in strong performance.