IHEC officials earlier this week warned several times that the Thursday deadline for the political parties to submit the names of their candidates for the Region’s June 10 general elections would not be postponed.
However, the commission announced on Thursday that it had postponed the deadline to Sunday to give the political parties more time to prepare their candidate lists and pave the way for a broader participation in the polls.
It is not clear how many political parties have submitted the names of their candidates so far.
In an unprecedented and surprising move, Kurdistan Region’s largest and oldest political entity, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) announced last week it would not take part in the long-overdue and contentious election.
The party’s politburo said that the court ruling was a continuation of its “unconstitutional rulings against the Kurdistan Region in the past four years” and called it an attempt to “return Iraq to a centralized system.”
This development has made many pundits speculate that the elections may not be held on time as the KDP is the largest Kurdish party and the dominant force in both Erbil and Duhok provinces.
The Kurdistan Region’s general elections were originally slated for October 2022 but have been postponed several times because of disputes between political parties and federal court rulings.
