ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — With growing calls for a boycott of Iraq’s October parliamentary election, a Kurdish official on Tuesday said Kurds should not waste their votes, but must send strong representatives to Baghdad.
“The best thing to do is don’t let any vote go to waste in the Kurdistan Region and the disputed territories, and have the most possible numbers of MPs in Baghdad. We must learn from the past. Those we send should be able to fight a good parliamentary and constitutional fight,” Saadi Ahmed Pira, a member of the Kurdistan Patriotic Union’s (PUK) politburo, told Rudaw’s Rozhan Abubakir.
Iraq will hold parliamentary elections in October, a year ahead of schedule. An early vote was one of the demands of anti-government protesters who took to the streets in 2019, but after assassinations of leading activists, the government’s failure to hold the murderers responsible, and rampant corruption, there have been numerous calls for boycotts.
Pira pointed to several factors that are “in the way of transparent election.” These include “meddling of foreign countries,” a “lack of trust in the constitution and the political system,” recent changes to the electoral system that divides the country into 83 voting districts instead of the previous 18, and “lack of acceptance that Iraq is mosaic, a mosaic of ethnic and religious components.”
Some anti-government activists have called for a boycott campaign, saying the elections will be open to fraud and overtaken by militias that operate out of the control of the state. Last week, the head of the largest political bloc in parliament Muqtada al-Sadr announced he was closing down his party, withdrawing his support for the government, and would not participate in the election race.
The latest boycott announcement came from Chaldean Patriarch Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako who said that Christians will not vote because of concerns over militias and possible fraud.
More than 24 million people, including over 120,000 Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), have registered to vote in the upcoming elections in October, the Independent High Electoral Commission said earlier this month.
In May, the PUK and Gorran announced they will run as a coalition. That alliance was cast into doubt last week after an internal power struggle within the PUK that saw Bafel Talabani take over leadership of the party, ousting his co-president Lahur Talabany.
On Monday, Lahur Talabany, who headed the alliance with Gorran, said he will step down from his post as leader of the Kurdistan Coalition “and will entrust its responsibility to the co-chair and leadership council” of the PUK.
Pira said the departure of Talabany has had no effect on the alliance with Gorran. “Nothing has changed from the coalition. What will be done is elect a new coalition head” and the PUK’s leadership council will look into that after this week’s Eid al-Adha holiday.
He said that maintaining existing alliances and forming new ones are important to strengthening the Kurdish vote.
There were attempts to form a broad Kurdish coalition, but the parties failed to find common ground and, apart from the PUK and Gorran alliance, the other parties will contest the vote independently.
