Reading the Elections in Iraq
Gareth Stansfield
Iraq’s 2014 elections have focused attention on the struggle for
political power not just between, but also within, the country’s main
ethnic and religious groupings.
I
raq’s elections have presented a
curious event for those watching
the politics of this deeply unstable and
fractious country. Curious not necessarily
because of the inordinately long lag
between the vote and the publication
of results, or the unpredictability of
the vote. In fact, the mirroring between
Iraq’s voting patterns and its sectarian
and ethnic identities lends some degree
of predictability to outcomes, although
some significant questions regarding
individuals’ likely success remain.
Rather, these elections are curious
because of the nature of the interest
they have generated in Iraq, focused
as this has been on the struggle for
political power within the country’s
main communal groups. Why this
should be the case says much about the
chaotic and parochial nature of Iraqi
political life, with elites, since 2010 if
not before, having become increasingly
fixated on the politics of their own
proverbial backyards. As such, they
have come to focus much more on
ensuring their own political strength visà-vis competitors from within their own
communal groups than on the struggle
with representatives of parties of other
ethnic and religious groupings.
To give an example of this, Prime
Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, who heads
the State of Law coalition that was
formed in the wake of the 2009
elections and includes a range of Shia
interests, has been far more concerned
about his position relative to the Shia
Al-Ahrar bloc – which includes the Sadr
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Movement led by Muqtada Al-Sadr –
and the Islamic Supreme Council of
Iraq (ISCI) Muwatin bloc, headed by
Ammar Al-Hakim. These two groups
– each commanding significant popular
support and enjoying strong ties with
Iran’s political, clerical and military
elite – pose perhaps the biggest threat
to Maliki, threatening to make inroads
into his support base and destabilise his
relationship with Iran.
In Maliki’s eyes, the possibility
of Sadr and Hakim merging their
efforts against him presented the most
significant problem in the run-up to the
election – even more than the ongoing
conflict with the Sunni insurgent group,
the Islamic State of Iraq and Al-Sham
(ISIS). Even though this conflict now
sees swaths of territory falling out of
the control of Maliki’s government, and
the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) regularly
suffering at the hands of the insurgents,
it is still beyond the wildest expectations
of ISIS that they could return Iraq to
being dominated by a Sunni-associated
regime.
A further pertinent example of ‘all
politics being local’ is the priority given
by President Masoud Barzani of the
Kurdistan Region, in northern Iraq, to
establishing the cabinet of the Kurdistan
Regional Government and managing
the repercussions of the demise of the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) as
a political force. The Kurdistan region,
until recent months, has been governed
by an alliance between Barzani’s
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP)
and the PUK of Jalal Talabani. With
the PUK suffering internal divisions
that led to the rise of a new, popular
opposition – the Gorran Movement led
by Nawshirwan Mustafa – the delicate
balance that has underpinned stability in
the region for over a decade has shifted.
These internal problems were clearly a
greater concern for the Iraqi Kurdish
leadership in April than the elections.
For
the
Sunni
community,
meanwhile, the previous ‘winner’ of the
March 2010 election, the Iraqiyya bloc,
which tends to gather the Sunni vote,
has largely fragmented into a range of
smaller components – the Mutahhidun
bloc of the Speaker of the Council
of Representatives (CoR) Osama AlNujaifi, the Wataniyya list of former
Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, and the
Arabiyya bloc of current Deputy Prime
Minister Saleh Al-Mutlaq. The result,
again, is that Sunni politicians are far
more concerned with their own internal
alliance-building – while managing the
difficult security ramifications of an
insurgency in their territory – than with
the broader balance of power between
Sunnis, Shias and Kurds.
Yet the results of these elections –
and how the results then impact upon
government-forming
negotiations
thereafter given that no single party will
obtain the 166 seats needed to form a
government – are critically important for
Iraq’s future. While events in Syria have
attracted the attention of the world’s
media and the international community,
the steady deterioration of Iraq’s
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political processes, elite-level compacts,
national security and overall societal
cohesion has proceeded at a worrying
pace, without attracting the same level
of attention. This deterioration began
in the aftermath of the 2010 elections,
and the failure then of Iraq’s parties to
form a government. Only in November
of that year, as a result of an agreement
reached in Erbil, did the government
form under Maliki, and only after he
had promised far-reaching changes to
the sharing of power across significant
governmental portfolios, as well as
the creation of a ‘national partnership
government’.
However, such promises proved
easier to make than to implement, with
Maliki’s detractors believing he never
had any intention of making good
on them. The subsequent years saw
none of the Erbil Agreement’s nine
parts and 48 paragraphs implemented.
Instead, the prime minister continued
to consolidate his hold over key security,
judicial and administrative portfolios,
and his opponents – Sunni, Kurdish and
also Shia – became increasingly fearful
of his continued hold on power.
The April elections were therefore
a product of at least four years of
building, simmering tension and took
place in the setting of a reinvigorated
Sunni-led insurgency, Kurdish moves to
wrestle economic sovereignty away from
Baghdad, and efforts within the broader
Shia political community to challenge
the continued rise of Maliki – a figure
that many saw merely as a stop-gap at
the top of a weak government when
first elected in 2006.
The elections were
a product of at least
four years of building,
simmering tension
In terms of the mechanics of the
elections themselves, on paper, the
process appeared sophisticated – or,
perhaps, overly complex. The elections
contested the 328 seats of the CoR,
with a 25 per cent quota in place for
women, and with a further eight seats
reserved for minority communities
May 2014, Vol. 34, No. 3
Iraq goes back to the ballot box. Courtesy AP Photo/Karim Kadim.
(namely Christians and Turkmens).
The election operated across eighteen
constituencies, with each governorate
(province) equating to a constituency.
The election saw electronic voting
cards (e-cards) distributed to ease any
issues with on-the-day polling. There
were some problems with this method,
however. Timing was clearly an issue,
with the late distribution of many of
these e-cards raising significant concerns
in the run-up to polling day. Of more
fundamental concern, the lists of eligible
votes were based on a theoretical registry
as no census had been conducted in
Iraq since the removal of Saddam. This,
combined with the introduction of the
e-card system, created an opportunity
to illicitly increase potential numbers of
supporters: it is relatively easy to acquire
identity documents that can be used to
qualify for voting.
The electoral method employed, the
Sainte-Laguë method, allowed people to
vote for either an individual or a party. It
also allowed seven compensatory seats
to be allocated to those parties securing
significant votes at the national level but
failing to gain seats at the constituency
level. This mechanism breaks the
stranglehold of the established parties
to a degree, but stands to benefit in
particular the bloc and supporters of
Maliki, who would previously break their
cohesion to run as independents during
the election and gain compensatory
seats, only to coalesce again behind their
leader after the election.
The electoral commission
has been criticised for
being politicised at all
levels
While the mechanics are welldefined, if complex, the same cannot be
said about the organisation tasked with
managing the election. The Independent
High Electoral Commission (IHEC) had
a difficult pre-election period. Criticised
as being politicised at all levels, with
Maliki’s opponents complaining that
he had ensured the replacement of key
personnel with his own loyalists, IHEC
found itself caught between the demands
of the prime minister, who through
the judiciary sought to bar several
CoR candidates, and those of the CoR
itself, which ruled that IHEC must not
bar candidates. Caught between a rock
and a hard place, the board of IHEC
threatened to resign on 26 March. Only
following the intervention of the UN
envoy to Iraq, Nikolay Mladenov, did
the board return to its duties, allowing
the election to take place.
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Nation-Building in Afghanistan
The actual election results will be
enigmatic at first – the blocs continued
to change shape right up to polling day,
while the post-election horse-trading
will see blocs alter again. Currently,
there appears to be a wave of defections
from Maliki to Hakim and his Muwatin
bloc of the ISCI, though the impact
of this will only become clear with
the release of results. What is already
evident is the opposition that now exists
among ISCI, the Kurdish bloc and the
range of Sunni groupings towards the
sitting prime minister securing a third
term in office. This animosity may see
some interesting moves, and countermoves, in the post-election period. In
mid-April, Hakim and Sadr – the two
leading Shia figures not aligned to
Maliki – were already openly discussing
an alliance to prevent a Maliki third
term. Commenting on the Sadr
Movement’s positive ties to the Sunni
Mutahhidun bloc of Nujaifi and the
Kurds of Barzani, Jawad Al-Jubouri, a
spokesman for Sadr, noted that ‘[o]ur
relationships with all parties are good
… whereas the Maliki coalition has a
feud with everyone’. Clearly, the lines
are being drawn between those who are
‘for’ and those ‘against’ Maliki.
Nevertheless, Maliki is such a
popular politician – as an individual
– and such an expert in the nuances
of managing alliances among Iraq’s
highly fractious political actors that it
is entirely possible that he will secure
a third term. Why this might happen
reflects the wily prime minister’s modus
operandi: Maliki has long shown that
he is the master of short-term and
decisive decision-making, while his
opponents have tended to waver – to
wait and see what happens. This has
allowed Maliki to steal a march on
them, creating realities on the ground,
as it were, while his opponents have
shown themselves unable or unwilling
to take the necessary decisions to
depose him. If this pattern continues,
one can expect the durable prime
minister to continue to occupy the
highest seat of power. If, however, his
opponents have truly come to the end
of their tether – with the other Shia
leaders willing to take action against
someone they still perceive to be an
upstart; the Sunni leaders combining
their relative strength to oppose him;
and the Kurds deciding that Maliki will
never deliver the de facto sovereignty
they crave – then the outcome could
be very different.
Professor Gareth Stansfield
Senior Associate Fellow and Director
of Middle East Studies at RUSI;
Professor of Middle East Politics and
Al-Qasimi Chair of Arab Gulf Studies
at the Institute of Arab and Islamic
Studies at the University of Exeter.
Twitter: @GRVStansfield
The Failure of Nation-Building
Peter F Schaefer
With the end of combat operations in Afghanistan fast approaching,
does the legacy of USAID there reflect yet another failure for Western
attempts at nation-building?
T
he ‘Who lost Iraq?’ debate has
already crept into the public
dialogue in the US, and the exit
of American combat troops from
Afghanistan at the end of 2014 will
almost surely spark a debate about
‘losing Afghanistan’. Finger-pointing
always follows perceived failure and
there is no decent interval on such
matters. The ‘Who lost China?’ debate
began just days after Mao declared the
founding of the People’s Republic of
China in October 1949, an event that
contributed substantially to the rise of
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McCarthyism (from February 1950)
and, then, to US participation in the
Korean War (from July 1950). Twenty
years later, the highly acrimonious
‘Who lost Vietnam?’ debate, following
the fall of Saigon in 1975, fuelled the
spread of the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’,
a malady that muffled US action for
decades.
The problem seems to be that
Western nations are not very good at
nation-building. The final report of
the Special Inspector General for Iraq
Reconstruction (SIGIR), published
in September 2013, notes that the US
spent $1.7 trillion trying to build up
Iraq – yet the report’s ‘lessons learned’
section seems to be little more than a
primer on what not to do next time,
based on what was done this time.
In 2014, both Iraq and Afghanistan
have
dysfunctional
economies,
kept barely afloat by oil and opium,
and continue to face persistent
insurgencies. The two countries
have civilian governments that are
ineffectual to a lesser or greater extent
and militaries that rely on systematic
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