ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) remains committed to its alliance with the New Generation Movement (NGM), entering long-stalled government formation talks as a unified 38-seat block, a party leadership council member said Tuesday. The statement came shortly after a Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) official reaffirmed that the party will only negotiate with the PUK as a standalone entity, while claiming the two sides are inches away from an agreement.
"If we needed to agree on 100 points, we [KDP] and the PUK would have passed 80. If the distance between us was previously 100 kilometers, it has now shrunk to 5 kilometers,” Ari Harsin, head of the KDP’s Sulaimani province branch, told Rudaw’s Sangar Abdurlahman, claiming that an agreement was in the making.
His statement was subsequently rebuffed by Aras Fatah, a party leadership council member from the PUK, who replied, “I do not know how those 100 kilometers became 5 kilometers,” while acknowledging that steps toward rapprochement “have been taken.”
The KDP and the PUK have shown deep-seated disagreements over the distribution of senior governmental positions and governance structure in the Kurdistan Region, ultimately engaging the Region in a political deadlock since the last parliamentary elections in October 2023.
Around two years after the elections, the tenth cabinet of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has yet to be formed and the Kurdistan Parliament has remained unseated.
A PUK-NGM bloc agreement in July further exacerbated tension after the decision to combine their respective 23 and 15 seats in an alliance to challenge the KDP majority of 39 seats in a 100-seat parliament.
The KDP has rejected the alliance, questioning its legitimacy by saying it was forged when Shaswar Abdulwahid - NGM’s leader - was in a PUK-held prison last year for a blackmailing lawsuit.
"We deal strictly with the PUK's 23 seats, not additional ones,” Harsin said Tuesday, adding that Abdulwahid's release from prison occurred through a “political deal with the PUK for political benefit.”
In response, Fatah stated that the PUK “has neither prisons nor private police” and that “Shaswar Abdulwahid was imprisoned by judicial order and was released after serving his sentence” with “no connection to political agreements.”
He further maintained the PUK-NGM bloc’s resolve to negotiate with the KDP with its 38 seats “to jointly decide on draft laws and the formation of a balanced government that features genuine partnership.”
The dispute comes days after Iraq’s federal supreme court on Sunday postponed two lawsuits against the Kurdistan Region.
One of the lawsuits seeks to change the status of the KRG to a caretaker government, therefore stripping it from its executive powers, while the other demands the dissolution of the Kurdistan Parliament.
Deferring the lawsuits to late October provides the KDP and the PUK temporary relief to advance the government formation talks.
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