Lawmaker warns of the proposed legislation for provincial council elections: plunges Iraq to square one

Shafaq News/ Lawmaker Ahmed Majid on Saturday deemed the proposed legislation for provincial council elections as a catalyst for political and social strife, warning that it would ultimately regress Iraq back to square one.

"Thorough deliberations in the parliament's committee for regions and governorates has shown that the bill is inherently unfair and entrenches the ruling elite, who have overseen two decades of failure, corruption, and injustice," Majid told Shafaq News Agency.

"The bill under study in the parliament might plunge Iraq back to square one. It might provoke social divisions, fan political conflicts, and might ultimately undermine national security," he explained.

"The regions and governorates' committee have raised a set of vital remarks and recommendations that will be discussed with the legal committee ahead of the second reading of the bill," he concluded.

A source told Shafaq News Agency that the legislative assembly failed to reach the necessary quorum to call in a session on the amendment of the provincial councils' law following the withdrawal of independent lawmakers.

Last week, Iraq's parliament finished the first reading of the amendment to the provincial council elections law, which regulates provincial council elections and the appointment of the governors. The amendment could enable Iraq's major parties to gain power vis-a-vis relatively new independent political actors.

Per its constitution, Iraq has two elections: one for parliament and one to form the provincial councils in charge of local governments. The last parliamentary elections were held in 2021, while the last provincial elections were in 2013.

The 2013 provincial elections were held in only 12 out of 18 provinces. The provinces in the Kurdistan Region and Kirkuk were excluded due to political disagreements, and Nineveh and Anbar were excluded due to security concerns prior to the Islamic State taking over these areas.

Iraqi Prime Minister Muhammad Shia al-Sudani included the provincial elections in his government program, and they are expected to be held in October of this year.

The new amendment will allow dominant political parties to expand their influence at the provincial level against the new-formed independent forces that arose from the 2019-2020 nationwide protests. The most controversial part of the new amendment is adopting the Sainte-Lague method to allocate seats among the political parties based on a party-list proportional representation system. Sainte-Lague doles out parliamentary seats using a quotient formed by dividing the number of votes a party received by the number of seats in parliament plus one. It favors established political parties and disadvantages small parties and independent forces.

The Coordination Framework, which nominated al-Sudani to become prime minister, seeks to integrate the parliamentary and provincial elections under one united law. If both elections were held simultaneously, the winning forces could dominate both parliament and the provincial councils.

The current parliamentary elections law was passed in 2020 as a result of the nationwide October protests that began in 2019. It adopted the multiple-circle system, in which each candidate can be elected for only one specific circle and the votes go to individual candidates — not political parties. The previous law dealt with Iraq entirely as one circle and favored the large political parties due to the possibility of transferring votes from one candidate to another from the same party.

The current law opened the space for the independents and smaller parties to gain more than 40 seats in the last parliamentary elections in 2021. But the new amendment seeks a return to the previous law.

In addition to changing the method of the elections, the amendment would also reactivate overseas voting and use manual counting instead of electronic counting.

Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's political allies will also be affected because their influence is stronger in specific areas. They benefited significantly from the last parliamentary elections, which did not use the Sainte-Lague method. They won 74 seats in parliament, the highest number for them since 2003.

Since the Sadrists withdrew from the parliament, they do not have the power to stop the new amendment. But they, and other independent forces, have already expressed strong objections. Sadrists confirmed that they will boycott the elections if the amendment is implemented.

Several newly-formed political parties, including Ishraqat Kanoun, Emtedad, and independent members of the parliament, also rejected the amendment.