Iraq: Parliament Adjourns, No Elections Law

Not that anyone’s interested, but I thought I’d mention that yesterday was the deadline for the Iraqi Parliament to pass an electoral law crucial for the next parliamentary elections, scheduled for January 16. Alas, parliament adjourned for the weekend. Reidar Visser explains:

Many of the biggest parties secretly want to keep a closed-list system instead of the new arrangements adopted in the latest provincial elections, so-called open lists. The difference between the two should be noted. It is not, as one of the biggest US newspapers recently suggested, that voters don’t know the names of the candidates on the closed list “for security reasons”! That is misleading:  Candidate names are known to voters under either system and voters can find the names not only of the candidate but also his or her father, grandfather and great-grandfather in publicly available registers. The closedness has to do with the ability of voters to rank the candidates. Under the closed list, this is decided by the parties whereas under the open list voters can promote favourites of their own, even if the party gave them a less prominent position far down on the list. The introduction of this system proved universally popular in the latest provincial elections and the new device was widely used by Iraqis (who promoted many local councillors from non-winning positions), quite regardless of the fact that the Iraqi electoral commission in practice undermined the system by not printing full candidate lists (voters instead had to use tables of correspondence on display in the polling stations). On the other hand, the established parties and politicians are worried about the new system – above all for fear of being deselected.

Of course, parliament took its sweet time passing the provincial elections law, too, yet in the end good sense prevailed and by all accounts the elections were a success. So lets not get all gloomy just yet.

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