🇮🇶 Ivan Bubnov, political scientist and expert at the CIIC Center, spoke especially for the Telegram channel "Center for International Interaction and Cooperation" about the parliamentary elections in Iraq.

On 11 November, Iraq held elections to the Council of Representatives, the lower house of the national parliament. The vote became a major test for the country’s fragile political system, divided along ethnic and religious lines.

The largest share of the vote went to the pro-government electoral bloc Reconstruction and Development, created earlier this year and securing 46 of 329 seats. Led by Prime Minister al-Sudani, this political force draws primarily on the Shi’a population and focuses on infrastructure development, and combines moderate Iraqi nationalism with a broadly secular agenda. Other Shi’a forces in parliament include the pro-Iranian conservative State of Law bloc and the Islamist Sadiqoun bloc, with 27 seats each. The largest Sunni force was the centrist Progress alliance, which won 28 seats. Kurdish votes were split between the right-leaning Kurdistan Democratic Party (26 seats) and the more left-leaning Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (15 seats).

No single party reached the 165-seat threshold required to form a government on its own, so extended negotiations on a governing coalition are expected in the coming days.

A key factor was the boycott of the elections by the radical Islamist movement led by Muqtada al-Sadr. In 2021 the movement had won 73 seats and became the largest bloc in parliament, but its refusal to compromise led it to withdraw from the Council of Representatives and attempt to shift the confrontation onto the streets.

Nonetheless, voter turnout reached 56% against 41% in the previous elections. Election day itself was largely calm, although on the eve of the vote clashes between supporters of Kurdish and Turkmen parties in the north of the country left one police officer dead. Observers and NGOs reported isolated cases of vote-buying and procedural violations, but Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) and the United Nations Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) assessed the elections as competitive and in line with the legal framework.