Iraqi Parliament Passes Election Law, Polls Set For April 30

BAGHDAD, Iraq – After weeks of debate Iraqi lawmakers amended a long-delayed election law, adding three more seats to the legislature and allowing nationwide polls to be held on April 30 next year.

“The amendments were passed with the majority of votes,” said Saeed Khoshnaw, an MP from the Kurdistan Alliance.

Vice President Khudayr al-Khuzai issued a decree fixing the polls for April 30 next year. But the amendments are subject to approval by Iraq’s Supreme Court, whose green light is needed for the elections to go ahead on time.

The proposal to add a clause to give special status to elections in Kirkuk province triggered a walkout by Kurdish MPs during the debate. But they returned to vote for the amendments as the proposal was dropped.

Oil-rich and multiethnic Kirkuk has been at the center of a territorial row between Iraq’s Arab central government and the autonomous Kurdistan Region in the north.

According to Azad Sreshrmai, a member of the parliament’s legal committee, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq (UNAMI) played an important role in reconciling differences among the political parties.

“The leaders of the factions in the parliament agreed with the UN proposal which was to add three more seats to the current 325 seats of the parliament, which brings the total to 328 seats,” Sreshrmai told Rudaw.

The political parties compete for 310 parliamentary seats, while eight seats are allocated for the minorities. The Kurdistan Region has been allocated three seats and one seat each goes to Baghdad, Basra, Babel, Anbar, Diyala, Dhiqar and Karbala.

In the March 2010 election, only seven “compensatory seats” were available and were given to the bigger winners of the election. Kurds got only one seat in 2010.

In addition to the number of seats, calculating how they are to be distributed had also remained a hurdle among the political groups.

According to reports, Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s State of Law list vehemently opposed the adoption of the Sainte-Lague method for the polls, but eventually agreed with that method.

That method was used in last April’s provincial polls, in which the State of Law list lost seats to the Citizen Coalition led by Ammar al-Hakim and the Sadrist movement of Shia cleric Muqtada al Sadr.