The Bush administration’s hopes for a government of national unity in Iraq, led by its favoured candidate, Ayad Allawi, the secular and pro-Western former prime minister, received a setback on Tuesday night.
Preliminary results showed that most voters opted for Sunni and Shi’ite religious parties in a Parliament in which nationalists who want an early timetable for a withdrawal of United States and British troops will have a stronger voice.
Allawi’s camp, which includes liberals, communists and his own secular followers, cried foul on Tuesday, as did the main Sunni coalition known as the Consensus Front, which includes the Islamic party. The election commission has at least a week to examine hundreds of complaints of violations on polling day and this is likely to be followed by weeks of haggling over government posts.
But the results suggest that the Shi’ite religious bloc, which dominates the current government, will retain most, if not all, the 140 seats it holds, giving it a majority in the 275-seat Parliament. It needs two-thirds to choose a president — a mainly ceremonial post — along with a prime minister.
Senior Shi’ite figures said on Tuesday that they will probably exclude Allawi from the government.
”We’ve started talks with the Sunnis and Kurds. Not many of us are eager to take Allawi on board. I don’t think he stands a chance,” said Haider Abadi, spokesperson for the Dawa party of the Prime Minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari.
Washington and London had been hoping Allawi would emerge as a compromise candidate for the top post. During his years in exile in the Saddam Hussein period, he had close links with the CIA and MI6. As prime minister for nine months until April this year, his tough law-and-order image chimed well with US policy.
The US and British governments, which praised last week’s poll as a triumph, are likely to paint the hung Parliament, the complaints of fraud and the bargaining over portfolios as further signs of healthy competition. But there was no disguising Washington’s disappointment on Tuesday.
Zalmay Khalilzad, the US ambassador to Iraq, said: ”It seems sectarian identity and ethnic identity have played the dominant role.”
Although he went on to say the US would wait for ”the principal groups to form a broad-based national unity government”, it was not clear on Tuesday night that they would. A Shi’ite-Sunni-Kurdish alliance without Allawi looked the most likely option.
Angry and convinced there was fraud, Allawi’s group is considering a boycott of the Parliament.
”We’ll be meeting tomorrow to decide whether to do this if the election commission doesn’t investigate the complaints properly,” said Thair al-Naqeeb, Allawi’s spokesperson, on Tuesday night.
Adnan al-Dulaimi, a leader of the Consensus Front, called for a rerun of the vote in Baghdad. The election commission says it has received 20 complaints serious enough to swing a seat unfairly. Final results will await its verdict on them.
The putative Parliament will include a higher number of anti-occupation nationalists. Moqtada al-Sadr, the young Shi’ite cleric whose militia confronted US forces in Najaf last year, had 30 candidates on the main Shi’ite list. A more radical wing of his movement, running separately as ”the Messengers”, took another 3% in the Shi’ite south.
On the Sunni side, a bloc known as the Front for National Dialogue led by Saleh al-Mutlak, a former Ba’athist, did better than expected.
In the current government, the Kurds are the Shi’ites’ main partners. But the current President, Jalal Talabani, one of the main Kurdish leaders, made it clear before polling day that he did not want to continue and hoped for a full executive role in the next government.
Allocating seats on the basis of the results released on Tuesday is complex. About 230 seats in the 275-member Parliament are filled from quotas given to each province: 59 to Baghdad, for example, and nine for Anbar.
The other 45 are split, partly on the ”best loser” principle, whereby small parties that did not win enough votes for a seat in any province have their votes totalled nationally. If this figure surpasses a certain threshold, they get a seat. After this is done, the remaining seats are split among the big winners in proportion to their national tallies. This will give the Shi’ite alliance even more.
Estimates are that the Kurds will have slightly more seats than the two main Sunni blocs combined, which is why the Sunnis are crying foul. They say their population easily exceeds that of the Kurds. — Guardian Unlimited Â