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THE giant ballot papers
for next Sunday’s Iraqi elections tell their own
story. At 3ft long by 2ft wide, each one carries no
less than 257 different political parties to choose
from.
Little wonder, then, that Dr Sadoun Al Dulame, the
head of Baghdad’s only opinion poll centre, is
cautious when asked what the country’s first elected
government might look like.
"There are so many different political parties, it
is very hard to say with any certainty what will
happen at all," he admits.
The only poll to be carried out in the country has
revealed that the Iraqi List, led by interim prime
minister Ayad Allawi, has 20% of the vote, the
Unified Iraqi Alliance (the Shi-ite religious block
also known as the Sistani List, stands at 42%, with
the Kurdish parties - Patriotic Union of Kurdistan,
the Kurdish Democratic party and other smaller
groups at 22%.
Yet with plans for the elections still on course
despite the efforts of insurgents to derail them,
the question now is no longer whether it will go
ahead but what the political landscape will look
like afterwards.
Ask the professors at Baghdad University’s College
of Political Science who will win and the answer is
an unscholarly, but uniform, shrug. For Iraq has no
previous election results to judge by - except the
ones in which Saddam Hussein bagged about 99.6% of
the vote.
Voters will choose 275 members of a national
assembly, whose main task will be to debate and
approve a new constitution. There will also be
elections to 18 provincial assemblies, as well as to
the autonomous Kurdish parliament in the north.
This will be a single, national ballot without
constituencies. Seats in the assembly will be
allocated by proportional representation using a
list system. The results will not be known for up to
10 days after the vote.
Once appointed, the assembly is then expected to
take a further fortnight to elect a president and
two deputies. They will, in turn, choose a new prime
minister - the real holder of power in the land.
Despite a huge TV and publicity campaign, cynicism
and plain apathy suggests that for much of the
population, the only right exercised on polling day
will be the right to stay at home.
Khalid Suhbai, 25, a student at the political
science college, said: "I will not go to vote
because who will give me a guarantee that I will not
get killed by a car bomb? And anyway, who would I
vote for? They will just be the same people as
before, who have done nothing for this country so
far."
Yet as the elections draw near, Dulame and his team
at the Iraq Centre for Research and Strategic
Studies are making it their professional duty to
call the results as accurately as possible.
Conducting Iraq’s equivalent of the Gallup or ICM
polls is not easy: in insurgent-prone Sunni areas,
would-be focus groups responded to the centre’s
researchers with threats of violence.
But after roping in tribal sheikhs to vouch for his
staff, Dulame, who has a PhD in social psychology
and political behaviour at Manchester University,
eventually managed a poll of 3,000 people in Baghdad
and southern Iraq.
With the dire security situation preventing any
polls by international organisations, it is the
closest indicator of how the new government might
look.
The Sunni Muslim presence will be very low, thanks
to a combination of voter intimidation and the
refusal of Sunni-allied parties to participate until
security conditions improve.
Yet the clear winners, he says, will be the Shi’ite
Iraqi Unity List - a block of mainstream Shi’ite
Islamic parties which ranges from moderates such as
the Dawa party to overtly religious sects like the
Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI).
Also known as the Sistani List after an endorsement
by Iraq’s most senior Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah
Ali Al Sistani, they will benefit hugely from his
decree that voting is a holy duty.
"If Sistani had not endorsed this list, it would
probably go down to around 15%," said Dulame. "But I
think overall it will be the strongest of all."
Iraq’s Kurdish parties - representing about a
quarter of the population - will also do well, he
predicts, on around 22%.
Allawi’s Iraqi List party, meanwhile, which includes
several secular groups and a number of other serving
interim government ministers, is predicted to get
roughly level with the Kurds at 20%.
Significantly, Allawi’s personal popularity ratings
are high at about 35% - streets ahead of anybody
else. Of the two main Sistani List players, Dawa
party leader Ibrahim al-Ja’fari only polls 13%,
while SCIRI leader Abdul Aziz al-Hakim polls only
4%. As a result, even a government dominated by
Sistani List figures might still choose Allawi as
prime minister.
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