The Iraqi Elections: Same Names, Different Teams - At War Blog - NYTimes.com

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By RAZZAQ AL-SAIEDI

After much delay, the Iraqi Parliament finally passed a law on Sunday allowing for national parliamentary elections — the third since the American invasion in 2003. Voting is scheduled to take place in the second half of January.

For Americans, the elections will be a crucial test of how secure Iraq has become, and thus how quickly U.S. soldiers can leave. The stakes will also be high for Iraqis, who will be putting in place a political infrastructure that, in theory, will outlast the American presence in their country.

As the elections approach, one major worry will be how much ethnic and religious allegiances, which plunged Iraq into deep violence in 2006, influence voters’ choices. The early 2009 provincial elections, in which the two main Shiite and Sunni Islamic Parties lost their ground to nonreligious parties, have given much hope that sectarianism will play a lesser role this time, too. But while the coalitions look different than they did during the last national vote in December 2005, many of the same candidates remain on the lists. Are voters less likely to vote along religious lines? How many Shiites will vote for Sunni candidates?

In addition to the question of religious allegiances is the fragmenting of what were essentially Iraq’s Big Three voting blocs — Shiite, Sunni, Kurd — in politics. Voters have new options in the upcoming election. Secular Shiites, for instance, have a choice beyond the National Iraqi Alliance that most Shiite Islamic parties have joined. Most prominent is the State of Law slate formed by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, a Shiite. Sunnis have similar alternatives to the Iraqi Islamic Party, the most powerful Sunni party since 2003. Even with this diversification, though, voters will probably support their sects’ parties.

The number of new choices may actually make forming a new government much harder. At best, the strongest coalition seems likely to gain less than 20 percent of the total voters, too weak to dominate the process of choosing the prime minister and president. After the previous elections, just three Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish coalitions dominated Parliament, occupying more than two-thirds of the seats.

Four years ago, the American government played a significant role in pushing the Iraqis to form the current governments. Most significantly, they succeeded in halting Ibrahim al-Jaafari’s bid to become the prime minister in 2006. Now, however, United States officials have limited influence in Baghdad. If the debate over the long-awaited electoral law took several months, how much longer will it take to pick the next president, the prime minister, speaker and the cabinet? How effectively would a lame-duck government be able to rule in the interim? Would delay and infighting make Iraq less stable?

Finally, there is the thorny issue of the Kurds. Since 2003, they have been the kingmakers, so to speak. How much time and political capital should the Arab coalitions spend on the Kurds? It is not likely that any coalition can form the majority without them.

Much attention has been paid to the issue of security in Iraq prior the election, yet I would be much more worried about tensions after the election.