“The participation rate in the general elections today reached 40 percent,” Ali Karim, director of the Diyala office of Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC), told Rudaw’s Mushtaq Ramadhan.
Of nearly 900,000 people eligible to vote, 359,364 successfully cast their ballot on Monday, Karim said.
Iraq held its long-anticipated provincial elections in 15 provinces on Monday. The last provincial council elections took place in 2013, without Kirkuk. The councils were dissolved in 2019 in response to demands by Tishreen protesters who criticized the system for its failures and for enabling corruption. After several delays, the election date was set for December 18.
The provincial councils were created by the 2005 Iraqi constitution following the fall of dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime. They hold significant power, including setting budgets for several key sectors such as education, health, and transport, but are accused of being rife with corruption.
The vote took place across 15 Iraqi provinces, excluding the three Kurdistan Region provinces in the north.
Over 7,000 polling stations opened at 7:00 am on Monday under tight security, and the stations closed at 6:00 pm.
Kurds in Diyala province’s Khanaqin see the elections as an opportunity to strengthen the Kurdish role in the local government of the city, one that has a majority Kurdish population but has been subjected to waves of Arabization by Hussein’s Baathist regime. Thousands of Kurdish families were forced to leave their homes after the withdrawal of Peshmerga forces following the Kurdistan Regional Government’s (KRG) independence referendum in 2017 and were replaced by Arab families from southern and central Iraq.
“Today is Kurdish voting day. I am telling people to come and vote so that they will not be displaced again,” a Kurdish citizen told Rudaw’s Arkan Ali in front of a polling station in the city.
Khanaqin is part of the disputed territories between the Iraqi federal government and the KRG, which stretch across several provinces including Kirkuk, Salahaddin, Nineveh, as well as Diyala. The disputed territories were meant to be resolved through Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution.
Article 140 of the Iraqi constitution has been one of the most controversial topics relating to the disputed areas in the war-torn country since the drafting of the constitution in 2005, as the failure to fully implement it has been cited as one of the main reasons for the continued attempts at demographic change.
The Article calls for the dispute over areas in the provinces of Diyala, Kirkuk, Nineveh, and Salahaddin to be resolved, and includes measures aimed at rectifying Arabization policies implemented under the rule of Hussein. It specifies that this process needs to be implemented by no later than the end of 2007, yet it remains to be fully applied around 16 years after that date.
The elections mark the return of the Sainte-Laguë voting method, a controversial system that uses the single-constituency per province system instead of the multiple-constituency system that was adopted for the 2021 parliamentary elections as part of the demands of the Tishreen protesters.
The parliamentary election in 2021 saw a record-low turnout as many voters were disillusioned with the democratic process and had little trust in Iraq’s political system.
