Fireworks at the center of Baghdad at the end of the day tried to provide these parliamentary elections of pomp and emotion that were missing in electoral schools throughout the day. Most observers had predicted that those of this Sunday would be the elections with less votes from the establishment of the UE Government by the US. And so it was: With 94% of the scrutinized voting centers, participation in the elections stood at 41%, lower than in the 2018 legislative (44.52%). The calls to the boycott of a discontent youth had their effect.
About 3,249 people, less than a third of them women, aspire to occupy one of the 329 parliamentary seats. It was the fifth elections since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and were held in advance to fulfill the promise that Prime Minister Mustafa Kadhimi did to the streets a year ago, in full wave of protests against the political class. But the streets did not respond. Even without manifesting, many Iraqis are disenchanted by the lack of reforms.
Just this October, two years of the outbreak of discontent with the lack of public services, corruption and foreign interference, which joined Iraqi of the entire political spectrum in the streets of the center and south of the country. The hard repression, at the forefront of which the Shiite militias were, left more than 600 dead. The movement that was born of that horror, called precisely Tishreeen (October in Arabic) was divided among the supporters of the boycott and a series of marginal reformist candidates.
"Iraqi leaders can not convince the people to support them because there is distrust and distance between them, as in Afghanistan," he explains, by way of a comparative example Ahmad Shah Mohibi, an analyst and promoter of the NGO Rise to Peace. Although 60% of the Iraqi population is under 25, according to witnesses, in the electoral schools, strongly saved and without just influx, there was mostly voting adults and the elderly. Hartazgo with politicians floated in the air.
Such reactions are the product of ankylosamiento of already sclerotic institutions due to the effect of the so-called 'Muhasasa Ta'ifia', the competency distribution system, based on ethnic quotas, which drove almost two decades ago. Its outcome, in Iraq, has been the section of the State and its parties, promoting the appearance of clientere and parasitic networks, more overturned in benefiting from the privileges obtained by quota than to be accountable with the population.
Such actions, however, threaten to compromise the legitimacy of Iraqi institutions at a time of political weakness, with the threat of the islamic state that is still persistent and the country being still battlefield of foreign powers. Kadhimi's success, a consensus leader, sitting at the negotiating table to Iran and Saudi Arabia, will serve to pacify the situation and, on the way, ensure continuity.
Of all the political forces that had proposed candidates, the best positioned to grow in the scrawny urnas was that of the Chíi Muqted Sadr cleric. Paradoxes del Destiny, who once directed theirs against the US, in a campaign of virulent sectarian attacks, now emerges as an implicitly backed figure, converted into a nationalism that rejects marrying even with the CORRELIGNERIO IRAN.
Benefiting from the Iraqi system, consolidating in a public job granting body, Sadrists have created a powerful structure capable of granting prebends to their supporters, as they appeal to the worker on foot and even cry out against corruption. Its religious primacy, in a Shiite majority country, ensures a base of support that, probably enough so that its criterion is decisive in the structure to place a prime minister of his preference.
The electoral day passed mostly without incident, although violence reached the polls. In an electoral college of Diyala, armed men burst opened fire against those present, injuring two vigilantes and fleeing. The security forces attributed the attack on the Islamic State. Another policeman was injured at an electoral college of Kirkuk in a similar assault. After the closure of the polls, at six o'clock in the afternoon, the Electoral Commission announced that the results were saved this Monday.
Date Of Update: 15 October 2021, 09:58
