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.