The real challenge begins, as winners look for coalition partners, reports Saif Nasrawi Once seen as a highly divided, sectarian and violent country, results in Iraq's local elections present a slightly more positive prospect of the country's political potential. Last week, Iraq's election committee announced the preliminary results of the provincial elections showing Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki's slate coming first in nine of the 14 provinces where the elections took place. Al-Maliki's State of Law Coalition scored well in Iraq's largest two cities, Baghdad and Basra, where it received 38 per cent and 37 per cent of the votes respectively. But it has only about 10 to 22 per cent of the votes in other smaller Shia-dominated provinces in central and southern Iraq, a clear sign that Iraq's political reality remains fragmented. The Sunni landscape resembled similar fragmentation with the exception of Mosul, Iraq's largest northern city, where the Al-Hadba List, a coalition of Arab secular technocrats and tribesmen, managed to win around 48 per cent of the votes, which should be attributed to the broad Sunni Arab mobilisation to end the Kurdish monopoly of the city's council since the last 2005 provincial elections which were boycotted by the Sunnis. "The big winner was fragmentation," wrote Philip Zeliko of the US think tank Foreign Policy, on Monday. Zeliko said on the organisation's website that "the political landscape is morphing into a fresh variety of factions and leaders. The United Iraqi Alliance bloc is disintegrating. The Sunni parties are more powerful, but they are much more fractured." The elections' biggest loser was the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI) which came second in most Shia provinces. Once Iraq's most powerful Shia Party, the ISCI won only 5.4 per cent of the vote in Baghdad, whereas it received about 55 per cent of the vote in 2005. In Basra ISCI had 48.7 per cent in 2005, now it won 11.6 per cent. The ISCI defeat propelled many Arab and Western analysts to presume a dramatic shift in Iraqi political opinion towards more secular and nationally inclusive forces. The ISCI, as well as its Sunni counterpart, the Islamic Party, which also performed badly in the elections, have been long perceived as highly sectarian in both their political discourse and practice. However, a more careful reading of the elections results reveals a more complex picture. No Shia party managed to win a significant percentage of the vote in any Sunni area, even the religiously and ethnically mixed province of Diyala where Al-Maliki's slate came fifth with only six per cent of the vote. The same applies for Sunni parties which were almost absent in Shia provinces. The Iraqi List headed by former prime minister Iyad Allawi, which is the country's largest secular and national political faction, advanced a little bit in Baghdad where it came fourth with 8.6 per cent of the vote. "Iraqis voted largely along sectarian lines," an Iraqi official told Al-Ahram Weekly on condition of anonymity. "But if we look carefully we might see positive indicators because at the end, the more moderate religious and less sectarian groups won the elections," he added. Al-Maliki's electoral campaign largely focussed on bringing back security, creating a strong central government and establishing more efficient and less sectarian bureaucratic structures. The premier's supporters also refrained from mobilising religious messages and institutes, and instead concentrated on promising to deliver better public services and more jobs. The Islamic Party's performance in Sunni provinces shows similar trends, winning only in the province of Diyala, 140 kilometres to the west of Baghdad. Moving towards a more stable and democratic Iraq will depend on whether winners can forge coalitions to govern the city councils, especially now that no single list won an absolute majority in any province. "With the approach of the parliamentary elections in December, all major parties might be tempted to revive their old coalitions to prevent any newcomers," an Iraqi MP warned. "If old and dominant political factions refuse to listen to the newly emerging voices in Iraq in order to preserve their vested interests, then the cycle of violence will erupt," he added.
