Election time again....

When I arrived back here last September, local Kurdish Government elections were in full swing. Nearly seven months later, the main parties have yet to form a government, though in reality it doesn't seem to matter that much.

Now we have Iraqi elections due at the end of this month. The Kurdish Government is almost entirely independent from Iraq and being elected as a Kurdish MP for the Iraqi Parliament must be one of the most boring and unsatisfactory (but lucrative) jobs ever invented. All the Kurdish MPs do is make up numbers - they represent no constituency, though a number are Minsters in the Baghdad government.

The Kurdish faction currently supports the al Maliki Government despite the government being Shiitte and Kurds being overwhelming Sunni. The Sunni parties in Arab Iraq are more fundamentalist (which Kurds are not) and more importantly, were key elements in the old Saddam Hussein regime and the Kurds are NEVER going to support that lot.

Kurds hold the balance of power in the existing government and as such were able to extract important concessions in regards to oil revenue. Their aim is to increase the number of Kurdish seat and maintain this balance of power. While they will have the numbers within Kurdistan, the real fight is to increase the numbers of Kurdish MPs from the disputed territories and particularly Kirkuk. However, Kurdish unity outside the KRG is fragile at best.

In the meantime we have a month of campaigning and every night Salim Street is an endless noisy parade of tooting cars and flag wavers. There is SO much bunting strung up along the streets that the local joke is that you can no longer see the sky.Along with all that noise are the occasional fireworks and gunfire, though it is hard to tell which is which. Security is intense with seriously armed soldier and police strung out along the main street, though the interaction between opposing parties is mostly jovial.

The videos were taken on Monday night - Thursday and Friday nights are much noiser.