The annual Middle East Research Institute (MERI) Forum commenced in the Kurdistan Region’s capital of Erbil on Tuesday, attended by dozens of local and international officials and experts. The two-day forum will address the various political, security, economic, and environmental challenges facing Iraq at the moment.
“The [eighth] cabinet started with budget cuts: no revenues from Baghdad, we had a war, we had a humanitarian crisis, we had a drop in oil prices, we had to cut civil servant salaries sometimes by up to 75 percent, we had to deal with months and months of boycotts of employees, we had demonstrations for months… however, we were unified in the government. We were able to bypass some of the political rivalries. Protect the government from the political infighting,” said Deputy PM Qubad Talabani at a panel during the forum.
Talabani became deputy to then-PM and current Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani in 2014, and has been deputy to current Premier Masrour Barzani since he assumed office in 2019.
The deputy PM noted that the previous cabinet was able to protect the government from the rivalries of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) “even though the prime minister was KDP and a Barzani, and the deputy prime minister was PUK and a Talabani.”
Talabani argued that the biggest challenge for governance in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region at the moment was a “lack of policies,” believing that the parties are more focused on fighting over political positions rather than prioritizing the government and implementing policies.
Though there have almost always been disagreements on different topics, tensions between the PUK and KDP resurfaced following the Iraqi elections in October last year, with the parties failing to compromise on a single candidate for Iraq’s presidency for over a year. Disputes continued even following the election of the president, as the parties disagreed over who should fill the ministerial positions in the Iraqi cabinet
The issues between the two ruling parties continued in Erbil as well, as failure to reach an understanding over the Kurdistan Region’s current elections law and the electoral commission obstructed the parliamentary elections to take place on their scheduled date of October 1, leading the legislative body to extend its term for an extra year.
