We’ve finally got results for the parliamentary elections held in December in Iraq:
BAGHDAD, Iraq (AP) – An alliance of Shiite religious parties won the most seats in Iraq’s new parliament but not enough to rule without coalition partners, the election commission said Friday. Sunni Arabs gained seats over previous balloting.
A top Sunni politician, meanwhile, appealed for the release of American journalist Jill Carroll and urged U.S. and Iraqi forces to stop arresting Iraqi women, as a deadline set by kidnappers was set to expire.
The Shiite United Iraqi Alliance captured 128 of the 275 seats in the Dec. 15 election, down from the 146 it won in January 2005 balloting, said commission official Safwat Rasheed. It needed 138 to rule without partners.
A Sunni ticket, the Iraqi Accordance Front, won 44 seats. Another Sunni coalition headed by Saleh al-Mutlaq finished with 11 seats, Rasheed said. A few other Sunnis won seats on other tickets.
That will give the Sunni Arabs a bigger voice in the legislature than they had in the outgoing assembly, which included only 17 from the community forming the backbone of the insurgency. Many Sunnis had boycotted the January vote.
Despite a better showing, one Sunni politician, Salman al-Jumaili, expressed disappointment and renewed complaints about election irregularities. Nevertheless, he said the Sunnis will “take part in the coming (parliament) and government and present our (election) challenges to the Iraqi judicial system.”
Kurds saw their seat total reduced. An alliance of the two major Kurdish parties won 53 seats, down from the 75 they took in the January 2005 vote.
A rival Kurdish ticket, the Kurdish Islamic Group, won five seats, a gain of three from the outgoing parliament.
A ticket headed by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, won 25 seats, down from 40 in the outgoing assembly. The United States installed Allawi as interim prime minister in 2004 and applauded both his tough stand against insurgents and his secular approach to politics.
Now the real horsetrading begins.
Iraq the Model noted yesterday in anticipation of the announcement:
Actually one of our biggest problems is the lack of trust between the different parties and more dangerous is the little trust the parties have in democracy.
This trust crisis is what causes those irrational reactions.
The Shia politicians, although they are the biggest winners in the elections are still behaving like victims and they worry about whether this or that Sunni candidate was part of the Ba’ath party. And the same applies to the Sunni who are afraid of Shia domination despite the fact that their (the Sunni) parties will control nearly 30% of the parliament and there’s no chance they can be marginalized again.
Not only that, both sides say they’re being conspired upon by the others. This lack of trust will keep being a problem for Iraq…I’m not expecting politicians to trust each other but I hope they mature to trust democracy.
There isn’t much in the way of reaction from other Iraqi bloggers yet.
