Iraq breaks political deadlock after year of crisis
The Iraqi Parliament elected Abdul Latif Rashid as president of Iraq on Thursday, October 13, ending a year-long political impasse marked by violence. The 78-year-old former Kurdish minister, a compromise candidate within the Kurdish camp, which has the upper hand on this honorary position, won the election against the outgoing president, Barham Salih. The new head of state has appointed Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani to form a government. The 52-year-old Shiite politician, who has been a minister several times, has 30 days to form his cabinet and try to fix the divisions within the Shiite majority, which is tearing itself apart for control of the state.
Al-Sudani's candidacy was at the heart of tensions over the summer between the Coordination Framework, an alliance formed by former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and pro-Iranian Shiite militias, and the populist Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr. Mr. Sadr, who won the October 2021 legislative elections, withdrew his 73 MPs from the Assembly in June, frustrated by his rivals' attempts to prevent him from forming a majority to form the new executive. Deprived of his parliamentary base, he took to the streets to block the Framework's decision to appoint Mr. Sudani as head of the government.
A sit-in staged by Sadr supporters in front of the parliament building in late July nearly degenerated into a war among Shiites on August 29, when more than 30 protesters against Mr. Sadr were killed in clashes with the army and pro-Iranian Shiite militias. This outbreak of violence prompted Mr. Sadr to call off the sit-in and step back, while threatening to bring his supporters back onto the streets. As a sign of growing tensions, rockets hit the Green Zone, the seat of the country's institutions, before the parliamentary session began on Thursday. This attack, which was not claimed by any party, left ten people injured, including four civilians.
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An 'important democratic step'
They did not prevent the election from taking place, which was hailed as an "important democratic step" by Paris and Washington. In the second round, Abdul Latif Rashid won with more than 160 votes against the incumbent president, who got 99 votes. A British-trained engineer and former minister of water resources from 2003 to 2010, Mr. Rashid is a member of the old guard of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK). The brother-in-law of former president Jalal Talabani, "he has stayed out of the party and is not very partisan," said Hardy Mède, a researcher at the European Centre for Sociology and Political Science at Paris 1 University. This is what convinced Massoud Barzani, the leader of the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), to support him "in a spirit of compromise."
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