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Baghdad (AFP) April 3, 2010 Iraq's Sadrists concluded an unofficial two-day ballot on Saturday over who should be the country's leader, after the bloc's strong showing in last month's election gave it kingmaker status. The "referendum", which has no legal authority, comes as sitting Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and ex-premier Iyad Allawi battle to form a government, with neither holding enough seats to claim a parliamentary majority. "The referendum has concluded and the participation rate was very high," said Saleh al-Obeidi, the Najaf-based spokesman for the movement. "The counting process has already started in the provinces, and in the next few days we will release the results." Both Maliki and Allawi were on the unofficial ballot, which also included the former's predecessor Ibrahim al-Jaafari. Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi and Jaafar al-Sadr, the son of an ayatollah who founded Maliki's Islamic Dawa Party and was murdered by Saddam's regime in 1980, are also candidates, while ballot sheets also included space for voters to write the name of their chosen nominee. Although the plebiscite was nominally open to all Iraqis, the vast majority of voters are likely to have been Sadrist backers. Sadrist officials were seen carrying ballot boxes around Baghdad, stopping people on the street and arriving on locals' doorsteps to ask them to vote. Voters were not required to present identification when casting ballots, and no official observers oversaw the poll, with little to stop people from voting many times. The referendum is widely seen as a way for the Sadrist bloc, whose 30-something leader has been in Iran for about two years, to avoid giving its backing to Maliki. The prime minister is a bitter enemy of the movement, having ordered an offensive against its armed wing the Mahdi army in 2008. Their mutual hostility transcends otherwise common sectarian roots and centralising tendencies. Maliki's State of Law Alliance finished a narrow second behind Allawi's Iraqiya bloc, with 89 seats to the latter's 91, but both fell well short of the 163 seats required for a parliamentary majority. "There is a big conflict in the political arena to choose the prime minister because of the competition between the winning lists," Falah Shanshal, a Sadrist MP, told AFP. "The choice of the masses is the first and the last on this issue." At least two of the four main blocs -- Iraqiya, State of Law, the Iraqi National Alliance (INA) of which the Sadrists are the largest faction, and Kurdistania, comprising the autonomous Kurdish region's two long-dominant blocs -- are required to reach that 163 threshold.
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Sadrists, Iraq's new kingmakers, hold sway over PM choiceBaghdad (AFP) April 2, 2010 Iraq's Sadrists started voting on Friday on who should lead the war-torn country, as they try to capitalise on a strong electoral showing that made them the biggest religious bloc in March polls. The movement loyal to radical Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr says its two-day nationwide "referendum" will give all Iraqis, not just its supporters, a chance to choose a prime minister from five Shii ... read more |
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