On 7 March the elections for the Iraqi Parliament take place. 6772 candidates are standing. They were nominated by 165 political groups and 12 electoral alliances and they are fighting for 325 seats in the Iraqi Parliament.

19 million Iraqis within Iraq have the right to vote, and a further 1,900,000 Iraqis in 16 countries abroad can also vote.

This will be the biggest election in the history of Iraq, and the amount of money spent on it so far is nearly $2 billion. It comes seven years after the destruction of the Saddam regime and while the US still have 100,000 troops in Iraq.

The parties participating divide broadly speaking into two camps: those supported by Iran and those supported by the US. The Arab countries and the countries neighbouring Iraq (like Turkey) support parties according to their own interests and their own relationships with either the US or Iran, and they have donated a lot of money to the parties they have alliances or other close relationships with. For example, according to Struan Stevenson, MEP and President of the European Parliament Delegation for Relations with Iraq, Iran has given millions of dollars to the parties it supports.

Many Iraqis believe that the election is just a game to legitimate the occupation that has turned Iraq into an arena for the competing interests of neighbouring countries and the US and European powers. In this contest the main losers have been the Iraqi people.

Here we must say that since the collapse of the dictatorial Baathist regime, the new rulers have not impressed favourably with their methods of rule, and meanwhile Iraq has regressed into a society largely dominated by religious and tribal forces. The new rulers have mainly been busy lining their pockets and have stolen all the resources of the country. Even as much Iraqi heritage as possible has been sold off, and they have become successful capitalists by accumulating money through politics and businesses connected with their political power, not through any process of production. In contrast, most Iraqis live in poverty and terror, eating food past its use-by-date (imported by merchants, local and foreign companies, all of whom give a cut to the politicians), and because of this and the lack of decent hospitals and health care, the average life expectancy has fallen from 68 to 48 since Baathist times, according to the World Health Organisation. This is why many Iraqis are not happy with the elections and think that past scenarios will be repeated.

In Kurdistan, which was seen as a symbol of democracy in the area, people’s opinion of the two parties, who had ruled the area for 19 years, has changed. This is because the leaders and top membership of these parties, who directly controlled all the national resources, ceased to care about ordinary people, yet interfered in every aspect of their lives. Symbolic of this was the fact that civil institutions were turned into party institutions, all state-owned land was transferred into names of leading party members or their nominees, the same happened with previously state-owned companies, and nepotism was rampant.

Their main aim was always just keeping their positions, in fact, the two parties still maintain two separate governments, and care more about the rule of their own party and their own interests than about the national unity government (the KRG). All these things have made people angry, and disappointed with their rule.

From the beginning free journalists and intellectuals criticised the parties’ “50-50” rule and their corruption, but they never listened to these criticisms. Last year Nawshirwan Mustafa, who for a long time was the deputy of Jalal Talabani, the General Secretary of the PUK and now President of Iraq, took a stand against the corruption and misrule of the PUK and KDP, and established a new electoral list called Goran (which means “Change”), which stood candidates in the last elections in July 2009 in Kurdistan. Goran managed to get twenty-five seats out of the hundred and eleven available in the Kurdistan Parliament.

By creating Goran, Nawshirwan was able to collect most of the people, from right to left, who disagreed with the policies of the parties, and provide an organising centre. If it had not been for Goran, people’s response to the July 2009 election and to the current one, would have been very poor, and turnout would have been very low. But Goran gave them a new hope that they could change things through elections, and this is why in the last two weeks the election campaign has been very lively, with a lot of popular participation.

I think, whatever the result of the elections in Kurdistan for the Iraqi Parliament, it will not have a huge effect on the Kurdish question in Baghdad. But the election result will bring a new political balance of forces in Kurdistan, which in the short term may affect the PUK most, and later on may affect the KDP as well.

So far Goran is popular mainly in Sulaimaniyah, Kirkuk and the Garmian area, and most of its vote has come from and will come from ex-PUK voters, and until now it has not been able to make effective inroads into KDP territory, like Erbil and Dohuk. This is because of the barriers that the KDP has put up to prevent other parties from getting publicity in their area – tearing down posters, threatening activists and so on. If Goran is not able to spread to the Erbil and Dohuk area, its success in the future will be limited.

This situation in Kurdistan is under close observation by the US and the Europeans, and they are concerned about the instability of the situation, which is why the US ambassador to Iraq, Christopher Hill, commented in the middle of February that “political observers think that the Kurds no longer have a united front and rather the situation is more complex with a new political entity emerging as an opposition and defecting from the PUK.” (Hawlati Info).

However, if Goran gets a good number of seats in this election, the alliance between the PUK and KDP may be affected. Likewise if Goran is successful, the PUK will remain, but only as a small weak party, and will still have a lot of internal problems, which is why it seems the PUK will not accept defeat, why the situation is becoming tenser, possibly even with violence following the election result.

Again in the rest of Iraq increased violence is expected after the elections, especially if the establishment of a new government takes a long time. But according to the Iraqi system, any alliance wanting to establish a government has to get 163 seats, but if it does not get this number on its own, it has to look for another alliance partner, and this is not easy. Many observers think that it will not be possible to establish a government until July, just as in 2005 it took three months to establish a government, and this delay will have a negative effect on security in Iraq.

Bestun Baban