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SULAIMANIYA, IRAQ
– With elections less than a month away, Iraq's
would-be politicians are getting a crash course in
one of democracy's least glamorous features:
preelection backroom haggling.
As the deadline looms for submitting party slates to
Iraq's electoral commission, Iraqi candidates are
vying for plum positions on the all-important lists,
which will determine who gets a seat in Iraq's new
national parliament.
In a sense, these backroom bargains are the
elections before the elections, pitting big players
- mainly well-organized former exiles - against
more-popular homegrown leaders, including top Shiite
figures, the real king-makers in the process.
"The election is like an exam," says Sheikh Fatih
Kashif al-Ghitta, a Shiite cleric from a prominent
Najaf political family. "[It] will show who really
has a base of popular support and who is a fake; who
has religious authority and who does not. It will
clarify many things."
Each group draws up a list of candidates, ranked
first to last.
The total votes each party receives will determine
how many seats it gets in Iraq's National Assembly.
Because seats are doled out in the same order as the
list, highly placed candidates are more likely to
get a seat.
Every third candidate must be a woman, in order to
avoid parties putting all the women at the bottom of
the list, a typical maneuver in some countries with
gender quotas.
Voters won't have to sift through hundreds of names
at the ballot box; rather, they'll see parties'
names and logos.
So far, about 238 "parties" - something of a
misnomer, since informal groups and even individuals
are free to run - have signed up for the elections.
On Nov. 28, the election commission extended the
deadline for the parties to submit their slates
until Dec. 10 (Dec. 5 in provincial offices), adding
to the intense speculation over what party lists
will emerge.
The extension buys time for the interim government
to woo Sunni opposition groups, many of whom have
declared a boycott of the elections. If Sunnis sit
out the elections, the new government's legitimacy
could suffer. It's too late for Sunnis to sign up
their own parties, but if prominent Sunnis could be
talked into signing onto other lists, it would help
the election's legitimacy.
The delay is also likely to help lesser-known
candidates, many of whom are still negotiating with
larger groups for better placement on the lists.
Many smaller groups, especially homegrown Iraqi
groups, are using the extra time to reach out to
larger, more established political parties.
For most candidates, the best way to win a seat is
to gain a top slot on a powerful party's list.
"It's very important for the independents to marry
other lists," said Muhammad Kadhim Obeidi, an
administrator in the Iraqi Democratic Congress, an
umbrella group of 200-odd smaller parties and
individual candidates. "The individuals have to band
together. Because once they get their seats, they
cannot accomplish anything without negotiation."
But aligning themselves with a powerful group can
also hurt smaller players: the bigger and more
powerful the group, the greater the chance it might
stick the small group's candidates at the bottom of
its list, decreasing their chances of getting any
seats.
The hottest ticket in town is the main Shiite slate,
which is endorsed by Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani,
Iraq's foremost religious authority and kingmaker.
Ayatollah Sistani insisted that Iraq's Shiite
majority, long suppressed by the Sunni minority and
eager to take power, form a unified slate that will
almost certainly have the maximum of 275 candidates.
But Moqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite clergy's enfant
terrible, is reportedly causing an uproar by
insisting that some names be thrown off the unified
Shiite list.
He's also demanding top billing, above former
Governing Council members Ibrahim Jafari and Abdul
Aziz al-Hakim, both former exiles. "Moqtada argues
that he is better known and more popular than all of
them," says Mr. Ghitta.
The Shiite Political Council, headed by onetime
Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi, is aligning itself
with Mr. Sadr. But Chalabi, a secular Shiite, is not
considered a major player by most Iraqi analysts.
"Ahmed Chalabi is making his last effort to get
somebody to support him, and I think that with the
reelection of Mr. Bush, he has lost his last hope,"
said Jawad.
In Kurdistan, the longtime dominance of two major
Kurdish political parties, the Patriotic Union of
Kurdistan and the Kurdistan Democratic Party, leaves
prospects for independents grimmer than in other
parts of Iraq. On Wednesday, the two parties crushed
any hopes of a real referendum on their popularity
by announcing that they would merge into one party
list.
"This election will be very weak - it will be like a
questionnaire, not an election," says Shwan Mahmood,
political editor of the independent newspaper
Hawlati.
"These parties ...do not play the democratic game.
So if they have one list, they will not let any
independents get very far," he says. "We can look at
Iraqi politics as a closed circle. Anybody who is
outside this circle will lose - they won't gain
anything from this election."
But some small-party candidates remain cautiously
optimistic - at least until the party slates are
announced.
"Usually, there are considerable pressures against
independents in Kurdistan," says Qadir Aziz,
Secretary-General of the Kurdistan Workers Party,
weighing his words carefully. "But when we see that
there are so many international monitors, we hope
that things will be better this time."
http://www.csmonitor.com
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