Multiple meetings were held between Kurdish parties to try and find common ground. The latest meeting was in Kirkuk last week, but the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and New Generation were both absent.
The KDP will field 55 candidates in eleven provinces and is running as an independent party, its elections office head, Khasraw Goran, said in a press conference on Saturday.
Gorran’s General Council was reportedly scheduled to meet on Saturday to vote on forming an alliance with the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). Rudaw English reached out to the spokespersons of both parties. Gorran's declined to comment and PUK's was not available.
The Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU) announced on Saturday they won’t contest the election, but are supporting six independent candidates. In a statement, the party said it had tried to form an alliance, but “it was futile.”
The recently rebranded Kurdistan Justice Group (Komal) will be fielding five candidates. The party “has not formed any alliance … because the demands that we had and what they had couldn’t be agreed upon,” Bestoon Hamasalih, the head of Komal’s election office, told Rudaw’s Snwr Majid on Saturday.
New Generation will also participate in the vote as a stand-alone party, according to its affiliated media.
Iraq was due to hold parliamentary elections in 2022. Early elections were one of the demands of protests that began in October 2019 across central and southern Iraq and Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi called for the vote to be held on June 6 this year. In January, Iraq’s council of ministers decided to push the date back to October 10 to give parties more time to register.
The Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) extended registration to April 17 for candidates and May 1 for coalitions, claiming that registration was low.
Iraq’s President Barham Salih last week met with Kurdistan Region’s President Nechirvan Barzani and discussed the “snap parliamentary elections in Iraq and how to pave the way for the process to serve the mutual interests of people and all entities in Iraq, including Kurdistan Region.”
