Iraqi political forces await "white smoke" from Erbil

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[size=52]Iraqi political forces await "white smoke" from Erbil[/size]

Kurdish parties stir stagnant water


Baghdad: «Asharq Al-Awsat»
[size=45]As a result of the inability of the political forces in Baghdad to reach any agreement that would end the political stalemate in the country, seven months after the early elections (2021), attention began to turn to Erbil and Sulaymaniyah. After a rupture between the two main Kurdish parties in the Kurdistan region, the visit of the region's president, Nechirvan Barzani, to the city of Sulaymaniyah recently stirred the stagnant waters between the two parties for more than four months. Although he has not yet nominated what can be dealt with as the beginning of a solution or a breakthrough for the political crisis in Kurdistan between the two Kurdish parties, the inability of Baghdad’s political forces, especially the continuation of the dispute between the two main Shiite forces (the Sadrist movement and the coordination framework) opened a window of hope that the Kurdish-Kurdish agreement It would end the crisis at the level of the position of President of the Republic.
The Iraqi constitution defines legal mechanisms for the formation of the Iraqi government, which should come through the most numerous parliamentary bloc, which is either the list that won the most votes in the elections, or the one that is registered in the first session of the elected parliament. The constitution itself, which made the process of government voting in parliament based on a simple majority of parliament members (half plus one), set out a complex mechanism for electing the president of the republic. According to the constitutional text, the President of the Republic, who must be elected after the first session of Parliament, and within the 15 days during which candidacy for the position is opened, must obtain two-thirds of the members of Parliament. Since the Iraqi parliament is composed of 329 members, any president of the republic must obtain 220 votes, a number that cannot be reached through the majority versus the minority, but rather requires consensus among all parties.
In the recent elections that took place late last year, and due to the insistence of the leader of the Sadrist movement, Muqtada al-Sadr, to form a national majority government, his coalition, which also includes the Sunni Sovereignty Alliance led by Parliament Speaker Muhammad al-Halbousi and the Kurdistan Democratic Party led by Massoud Barzani, was not able to obtain this number of deputies because of owning His Shiite opponent (the coordinating framework) is what has come to be called (the blocking third). The blocking third includes the majority of Shiite forces that challenged the election results, including the Fatah Alliance led by Hadi al-Amiri, State of Law led by Nuri al-Maliki, Asa’ib led by Qais Khazali, the Wisdom Movement led by Ammar al-Hakim, al-Nasr led by Haider al-Abadi and armed factions. What made matters more complicated is the new interpretation of the Federal Court, which stipulates that the quorum of the session continues by a two-thirds majority throughout the duration of the election of the President of the Republic, whether in the first or second session in the event that none of the contenders obtains a two-thirds majority.
For this reason, the forces of the Shiite coordination framework began to blame the Kurdish leader, Massoud Barzani, for splitting the Shiite ranks when he allied with Al-Sadr at their expense in order to pass his candidate for the presidency, Riber Ahmed, after the Federal Supreme Court excluded his former candidate, former Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari. For their part, the opposing Shiite forces (the current and the framework) have been unable over the past seven months to reach a solution to the crisis of choosing the prime minister among them, even though al-Sadr nominated his cousin Jaafar al-Sadr, Iraq’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, for the position of prime minister without the support of this nomination from the forces of coordination framework. As a result of all this, attention began to turn to Erbil, whether in terms of what was said that there is an initiative by Kurdish leader Massoud Barzani that has not been announced so far, or the recent visit of Nechirvan Barzani to Sulaymaniyah. But, according to what was reported by "Al-Sharq al-Awsat", an informed Kurdish source, "Nechirvan Barzani's visit to Sulaymaniyah, despite its positiveness, especially in terms of his meeting with the President of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, Bafel Talabani, however, during this visit no agreement was reached regarding the position of President of the Republic." The source added that “what happened is the agreement to resume the dialogue between the two parties, which stopped months ago,” noting that “this dialogue includes not only the National Union, but other Kurdish parties, especially since there are close elections in the region, which requires coordination between the partisan forces within the region.” . The source explained that "what the president of the region did by investing in the graduation of the military course in Qalagolan in Sulaymaniyah paved the way for a positive movement. Barzani himself, with the assistance of the Speaker of the Kurdistan Regional Parliament and Deputy Prime Minister Qubad Talabani, played a role to bridge the views between the Kurdish parties."[/size]
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