Tuesday, May 20, 2014

The Iraqi Elections

The provisional results for the Iraqi elections held last month were finally released yesterday at 3pm. Heavily armed soldiers and extra police were deployed around the city, but everything was very calm and by 7pm they had drifted off home.

The Iraqi Parliament has 320 seats and the Shiite parties supporting Mr Malaiki have emerged as the largest party with 92 seats, an increase on the previous elections. The Sunni parties remain divided while the Kurdish bloc has increased their number of seats to 92.

Malaiki now has to find another 90 seats to form a government and his problem is that several of the larger parties, including the Kurds, have publicly declared that they would not support Malaiki for a third term. But politics is politics and now the horse trading begins with some pundits commenting that it could take until the end of the year to form a new government. Even now the Kurdish region is still without a final government despite the elections being held in last September.

While the elections were reasonably fair, the immediate prospects for Iraq is continuing chaos. 

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