The autonomous Kurdistan Region of Iraq has been without a government since September after disputed parliamentary elections, and a fresh political crisis has now arisen amid a rift between the region's main political parties over power-sharing. Kurdistan's two traditional political parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) headed by Masoud Barzani and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) of former Iraqi president Jalal Talabani, have failed to deliver hyped promises of success to end their dispute over a new government. The two parties' fractious and fruitless attempts to form a new government came to an end after KDP authorities arrested five PUK members without clear charges. The PUK said it would not enter a new round of talks on forming a government until its members were released. The KDP came first in the elections, winning 45 seats in the 111-member assembly and positioning it to lead the next regional government. According to the results released by the region's Election Commission, the PUK came in second place with 21 seats. Initially, the PUK said it might not recognise the results of the elections due to what it described as “violations,” but later it appeared to backtrack, injecting uncertainty into the process. Other smaller political parties also cried fraud after the parliamentary elections, but they later accepted the results. The detention and retaliatory arrests last week, however, raised tensions in the semi-autonomous region, sparking fear of armed confrontations. The two historic rivals have fought each other, but they have also taken to sharing power, though they have kept their armed organisations, known as Peshmergas, under their own control. The new dispute started in October 2017 after the KDP leadership accused PUK Peshmergas of “treason” for assisting the advance of Baghdad forces to retake the oil-rich province of Kirkuk following a botched Kurdish independence referendum the previous month. As a result, the two parties entered the new Iraqi parliament without a united front as they have done since 2005 when Iraq saw its first parliamentary elections after the fall of the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. The election of PUK senior leader Barham Salih as president of Iraq following last year's national elections intensified the bickering. The KDP nominated Barzani's chief of staff Fouad Hussein, the current finance minister. At issue now is competition between the two parties over the allocation of cabinet positions in the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), further unsettling the region's fragile political system. Capitalising on its parliamentary majority, the KDP has nominated outgoing Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani as the new KRG president to replace his uncle Masoud and has selected Masrour Barzani, Masoud's son and head of the region's security forces, as the new prime minister. The PUK has accused the KDP of seeking a monopoly of power and has demanded a bigger share in both the parliament and the government, including the positions of both speaker and deputy prime minister in addition to several portfolios in KRG and the central government in Baghdad. The KDP, meanwhile, says each bloc in the KRG parliament should be given government portfolios proportionally according to the number of their seats in both the regional and central parliaments. The crisis comes amid an escalation in tensions in Kirkuk over the raising of the Kurdistan flag by the PUK over its offices in the city. Baghdad immediately called the move “unconstitutional” and demanded that the flag be taken down. It insisted that Kirkuk remain under its control and dispatched reinforcements from the elite Counter-Terrorism Force to take control of the situation and force the PUK to lower the flag. The timing of the Kirkuk provocation seems to be propitious for the PUK to try to drum up national fever and shore up public support in the battle to form the region's government. However, the deadlock means that nearly three months after the parliamentary elections, a Kurdish government still has not been formed, and the rift between the two traditional parties is deepening. After a summit meeting on Monday leaders of the two parties said they need more time to finalise an agreement on forming a new government. Barely 15 years ago, Kurdistan was being dubbed by the Western media as a budding democracy and portrayed as a role model for the rest of Iraq. Now Kurdistan is awash with conflicts that have been pushing the region into stormy political waters. The region's dysfunctional political system lies at the heart of the problem. The Kurdish movement in Iraq has failed to build a genuine union after it carved out self-rule status following the defeat of Saddam in the 1991 Gulf War and the withdrawal of Iraqi federal forces from the Kurdish-populated north of Iraq. Together, the KDP and the PUK formed an administration to run the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq under the protection of a US-led coalition. In May 1992, the Iraqi Kurds held their first elections to choose representatives for a legislative council. The aim was to form an administration that would provide public services and meet the basic needs of the population after Saddam's retreat. But what had been envisaged as a consensual democracy has been replaced in effect by a deeply incoherent system of power-sharing between the two main groups, which has effectively turned Kurdistan into a shared autocracy. Having failed to achieve a majority in the Kurdistan National Assembly and form a government, the KDP and the PUK agreed to share power by dividing the seats in the government equally among themselves, a process dubbed as a 50/50 deal. But soon the power-sharing system proved to be flawed. The alliance started to deteriorate as the two parties fought over resources and government revenues, and each of them remained entrenched in territories under its control, refusing to integrate into the union. The volatility soon led to a breakdown in the system when the KDP, supported by Saddam's Republican Guard, stormed Erbil, the Kurdish capital which was under PUK control in 1996. While Barzani maintained his party's grip on most of Iraqi Kurdistan, the PUK resisted his claims of jurisdiction over the whole of the territory. Hundreds of its members were killed in fighting over territory and political clout. The PUK forces remained concentrated around the town of Suleimaniya, a traditional stronghold of Kurdish leftist nationalists close to the Iranian border. It was only after the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 that toppled the Saddam regime that the KDP-PUK coalition imposed its control over the new administration in Kurdistan, which was declared a federal region by Iraq's post-Saddam constitution. There are multiple reasons behind the failure of the 50/50 formula that split power equally between the two parties, including the traditional competition over power and resources and the heavy-handed rule both parties have imposed on the region. Kurdistan's democracy had also gone sour in the years since the two parties dominated the autonomous government because of rampant corruption by the small but powerful elites that dominated politics and the security forces. The increasingly authoritarian nature of Barzani also played a role in turning Kurdistan away from democracy. As president and head of the region since 2005, Barzani had enormous powers including supervising the powerful Peshmergas and the region's resources. When his tenure ended in 2013, he tried to amend the election law in order to remain president despite the legal and constitutional limits. He remained in office without elections until he gave up his position after the independence referendum he championed had backfired and triggered a regional crisis. Growing speculation now suggests that Barzani, who is chairman of the KDP, plans to stay as godfather in the region while powerful members of the Barzani clan wield enormous power in Erbil, the KRG capital, and the northern province of Dohuk and Kurdish towns in the Arab-dominated Nineveh Province. On the other hand, the family of former PUK leader Jalal Talabani, who died in 2017, has also succeeded in building a political clan that enjoys strong leadership in Suleimaniya and Kirkuk and other areas. Under such a geographical and political division of power, a sustainable solution to the Kurdistan government crisis seems to be in doubt unless there is a lasting deal on reforming the entire political system in the region that will put limits on the powers enjoyed by the two clans and their political parties. The price of stabilising Kurdistan and ending its lingering political crisis is developing a democratic parliamentary system that will give all political parties a real voice and end the monopoly of power and wealth by Barzani's KDP and Talabani's PUK.
