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Iraq
Iraq's Prime Minister-designate Mustafa al-Kadhimi delivers his first televised speech after his nomination ceremony, in Baghdad, Iraq, April 9, 2020. Photo: Screengrab of state TV/AFP
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Iraqi Shiite political blocs have rejected all the names on Iraqi Prime Minister designate Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s proposed cabinet list, according to a senior member of al-Hikma Shiite political coalition.
Rahim al-Aboudi of al-Hikma, a coalition led by Ammar al-Hakim, told Rudaw late Friday that a meeting was held at the house of Hadi al-Ameri, the head of Fatih coalition, which resulted in the rejecting all the names on Kadhimi’s proposed cabinet list.
“In a meeting tonight in Hadi al-Ameri’s house in Baghdad, all the names that Mustafa al-Kadhimi proposed in his cabinet list were rejected by the Shiite political parties,” al-Aboudi said.
A rejection of this magnitude makes it highly unlikely that Kadhimi's current list , which had not been completed, will move forward.
The meeting was attended by the Iraqi parliament’s seven biggest Shiite coalitions, namely Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr’s Sairoon bloc, alongside the Fatih bloc, the Hikma bloc, the Nasr bloc, the State of Law bloc, the Atta bloc, and the Fadhila bloc.
Kadhimi handed over a letter containing a list of ministers nominated for Iraq’s next cabinet to Shiite political parties on Wednesday, according to the state Iraqi News Agency (INA) outlet.
After the cabinet list was proposed by Kadhimi late Wednesday, an MP from the Sairoon coalition – parliament’s biggest faction – cast doubt on whether Kadhimi’s cabinet selections would be approved.
“It will be difficult for the cabinet proposed by Mustafa al-Kadhimi to be passed by Iraqi parliament,” Sairoon MP Badir al-Ziyadi told Rudaw English on Thursday.
“The ministers proposed for the cabinet in Kadhimi’s letter result from pressures from political parties for their own interests,” he said.
Iraq has not had a fully-functioning government since December, when mass protests forced then-Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to resign, after just a year in office. Since then, Shiite political parties have wrangled over who should replace him and form the next Iraqi cabinet.
A former director of Iraq’s intelligence service, Kadhimi was appointed as PM-designate on April 9, and granted a month in which to select a cabinet to be presented to Iraqi parliament.
His appointment has so far managed to garner more cross-party support than his two PM-designate predecessors – former communications minister Mohammed Tawfiq Allawi, then three-term Najaf governor and Nasr parliamentary bloc leader Adnan al-Zurfi.
But getting a selected cabinet approved has so far proven an impossible task for Iraq’s prime minister-designates.
When Allawi sought to get a cabinet of independent technocrats approved by parliament, Sunni, Kurdish, and some Shiite parties rebelled, fearing they would lose influence.
Zurfi was unable to hold the role long enough to make his cabinet picks, elbowed aside by parliament’s powerful Shiite blocs for their preferred candidate – current PM-designate Kadhimi.
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