The battle inside and outside the Iraqi parliament was fierce and bitter, but by the evening of Oct. 2, Barham Salih had managed to pull off one of the biggest electoral feats in recent Iraqi history by putting his faith in Iraqi parliamentarians to elect a new president. That night, the overwhelming majority of parliament members, 219 out of 329 total, voted to install Salih, a Kurd who believes in the territorial integrity of Iraq and who has vowed to work for all Iraqis.

Since 2003, the Iraqi presidency has been reserved for a Kurd, the parliament speakership for a Sunni and the premiership for a Shiite. Although Salih’s election has generally been welcomed among Iraqis, including the Kurds, his victory marked an escalation in tense relations between Iraq's two dominant Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), already at odds over the governing of Iraqi Kurdistan and related socioeconomic issues.

Earlier this year, Salih had split from the PUK to form the Coalition for Democracy and Justice, which adopted a platform based of fighting corruption and advocating government reform. He then abandoned the coalition and rejoined the PUK to become the party’s nominee for the presidency in September.

Having failed to convince the PUK to nominate him for the 2014 presidential race, Salih decided this time around to put his trust in the Iraqi parliament should he not succeed in securing the necessary support from the KDP's leader, Massoud Barzani, so he could run as the Kurds' consensus candidate. The Kurdish parties can nominate one or more candidates, but in the past, they had reached agreement and put forth a single nominee. This year, however, they could not settle on one candidate.