The dreams that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had to remain in his post for a third term are likely to have completely vanished, just like the dreams of his State of Law coalition, which is seeking to remain a large bloc in parliament to bargain over influential positions in the next government.

The development that settled the matter in this direction is the position of the Shiite authorities in Najaf, which have explicitly announced that they oppose the electoral system that Maliki and his coalition want to adopt in the parliamentary elections scheduled for early next year. Maliki and his coalition want to abolish the so-called "Saint Lego" system, which was adopted in the last provincial elections, to return to the closed-list system, deemed by the Federal Court as unconstitutional.

The Federal Court ruled in 2010 that the closed-list system — adopted in the parliamentary elections of that year — is an invalid system because it violates the provisions of the 2005 constitution, since it does not achieve equality among various members of society.

The ruling came after a case was filed by two of the candidates running for those elections to challenge the closed-list electoral system. In the close-list system, each entity participating in the elections submits a list of candidates, and people vote for the entire list, not for each candidate separately. If a list loses, the votes it received get added to the balance of the winning lists, in accordance with the percentage of votes each received. In other words, this system allows the winning blocs to get the votes of those who lost, in order to have a bigger share within the parliament. The system allows the heads of lists to distribute the votes to the candidates of their choice. Because of this system, candidates who only got a few hundred or a few thousand votes reached parliament, as they got their votes from the losing lists through the heads of their lists.