Iraqi Kurdistan Parties Concerned About New Electoral Law
Minor political parties in Iraq’s Kurdistan region have expressed concerns that the new electoral system will not allow for proper representation, writes Abdel Hamid Zebari.
The minor parties in the Iraqi Kurdistan region believe that the semi-open list electoral system works in their favor better than the proportional or closed-list electoral systems, which do not allow these parties to be properly represented in the Iraqi Kurdistan parliament.
A significant number of Kurdish parties have only one or two seats in the region’s parliament, which they won as a result of their alliance with a group of parties or with the two major parties of the region — the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) led by President Massoud Barzani and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) led by Jalal Talabani.
In 2009, the parties led by Barzani and Talabani won 59 seats out of 111. The opposition Movement for Change took over 25 seats, while the Islamic Union, the Islamic Group and the Kurdistan Socialist Democratic Party won 12 seats. Afterward, the Socialist Party withdrew from the opposition alliance to participate in the government.
The “Freedom and Social Justice” bloc’s list won only a single seat, despite that it comprises seven leftist parties, including the Kurdistan Communist Party. The Toilers’ Party, on the other hand, has won one seat, while the Islamic movement won only two. The rest of the seats were distributed between the Turkmen, Assyrian, Syriac, Chaldean and Armenian minorities according to the quota system.
