The Kurdistan Democratic Party’s (KDP) plan includes engaging in intense talks with other Kurdish parties to present a united front in Baghdad and better serve the interests of the Region, Hoshyar Zebari told Rudaw’s Sangar Abdulrahman in an interview aired on Thursday.
This includes a meeting between Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani and the Kurdish parties so “we agree and try as Kurds to have one delegation that negotiates with the other winning parties whether Sunni, Shiites or Iraqis as representatives of the Kurdistan Region,” Zebari added.
Iraqis voted in an early election earlier this month under a new electoral law. The KDP achieved a massive victory, tying for third place with 33 seats and once again taking the position of largest Kurdish party in the Iraqi parliament, according to preliminary results.
A KDP delegation on Monday visited Sulaimani where they met with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), Change Movement (Gorran), and the Kurdistan Socialist Democratic Party in separate meetings.
“We will visit all political parties regardless if they have a presence in Baghdad or not, and we will be visiting all those parties who have expressed their will to give strength to the Kurdish side in the Iraqi parliament,” KDP spokesperson Mahmood Mohammed said following the visits.
The preliminary results handed victory to Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr whose bloc won over 70 seats. Sadr has already formed a negotiating committee to hold talks with other parties in order to form the government. The KDP is believed to be one of the parties Sadrists want to work with.
Zebari said there are agreements with the Sadrist bloc and several other parties including independents, but nothing has been finalized yet.
“It’s a little early for the formation of the Iraqi government … because there are some temporal, political, and constitutional contexts,” he said.
The preliminary results also show some of the strongest Iran-backed parties had their seats in parliament slashed. The parties rejected the results and their supporters on Tuesday took to the streets of Baghdad to protest the results of the elections, calling for a recount or a new vote. This could complicate the process of government formation, according to Zebari who noted that peaceful protests are “natural right.”
Zebari, also led the party’s election campaign, revealing a strategy that his team drafted in light of the new electoral law after the vote.
The new system expanded the number of constituencies from 18 to 83. If a candidate gained more votes than needed to win a seat, the rest of the votes will not be given to another candidate from the same party but be wasted - unlike the previous system.
“This system was different, it was a little difficult. One of the things that Iraq and the electoral commission didn’t succeed at was educating the people on how to adapt to the [new] system,” Zebari stated.
The KDP won 25 seats in the 2018 elections in Iraq. Their win in the recent election was unexpected to many as the Kurdistan Region has been suffering from a financial crisis and the KDP-dominated Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) has failed to pay its civil servants in full and on time for years.
The number of votes the party received had significantly decreased compared to the previous elections but it still managed to gain seven more seats as the party chose to make telephone calls and house visits to constituents based on an internal zoning system, asking registered voters from each zone to vote for a specific candidate.
Pundits believe that the low election turnout was one of the main factors behind the remarkable victory of the KDP in the vote.
