A veteran returned with a rare agreement between Al-Maliki and Al-Halbousi.. Who is the new Speaker

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[size=52]A veteran returned with a rare agreement between Al-Maliki and Al-Halbousi.. Who is the new Speaker of Parliament?[/size]

[size=45]Mahmoud Al-Mashhadani, a doctor with an Islamic background, has returned to the forefront after nearly 16 years since his resignation from the position of Speaker of the Iraqi Parliament.[/size]
[size=45]Al-Mashhadani was born in Baghdad in 1948. He completed his primary and secondary education there, then joined the College of Medicine in 1966 and obtained a bachelor’s degree. He then graduated with the rank of first lieutenant doctor in 1972, to work as a doctor in the Iraqi army.[/size]
[size=45]Al-Mashhadani, who was elected as Speaker of Parliament yesterday, Thursday, was the first legislative speaker in Iraq after 2003, and was also elected as President of the Arab Parliamentary Union in 2008.[/size]
[size=45]How did Al-Mashhadani return?[/size]
[size=45]Although Al-Mashhadani's return was first linked to his presidency of the last session, in 2021, as he was the oldest member before the election of Mohammed al-Halbousi for a second session, he returned to the position today supported by an elderly leader like him, Nouri al-Maliki, the former prime minister, after fierce competition within the Sunni forces.[/size]
[size=45]In 2022, Al-Mashhadani was subjected to an “assault” while he was chairing a session as the senior member, after which he was removed from the session and taken to the hospital.[/size]
[size=45]He is the only one left from Al-Mashhadani’s generation in parliament, after he was classified as one of the “founding fathers” of the post-2003 regime. He also considers himself one of the senior Sunnis who have distanced themselves or been removed from the political process, such as Tariq Al-Hashemi, Khalaf Al-Alyan, Saleh Al-Mutlaq, Rafi Al-Issawi, and Iyad Al-Samarrai.[/size]
[size=45]Although Al-Mashhadani was among the early victims of the displacement operations, he was able to return by following a soft policy that guaranteed him to remain in the forefront in one way or another, until he was surprised by the unprecedented support provided to him by his friend, the Shiite leader Nouri al-Maliki, who still holds many of the threads of the political game in Iraq, to ​​be the Speaker of Parliament.[/size]
[size=45]Al-Maliki's entry into the Sunni-Sunni rivalry led to further fragmentation in the component's front, leading to what appeared to be a Shiite-Shiite consensus to support Al-Mashhadani as a Sunni who has no ambition.[/size]
[size=45]Mohammed al-Halbousi, who considers himself the leader of the Sunni majority in Iraq, justified his support for al-Mashhadani in order to “compensate him for the period he lost when he was dismissed in a conspiracy hatched against him by the Islamic Party,” according to a televised statement.[/size]
[size=45]Founding Generation[/size]
[size=45]Before he found himself in complete agreement with Maliki, Al-Mashhadani was highly critical of Shiite leaders throughout his years of political work, especially during his tenure as Speaker of Parliament in 2006. When national reconciliation efforts were failing in the face of the boiling sectarian violence that swept the country at that time, Al-Mashhadani was forced to resign in 2008, which was closer to dismissal.[/size]
[size=45]In the following years, Iraq was caught up in the tensions created by the ISIS invasion, which included waves of displacement. During that period, Mashhadani seemed to be out of the picture, except for contradictory media appearances.[/size]
[size=45]Despite the repetition of what seemed to be Al-Mashhadani’s “fluctuations” and his provocative opinions even during the parliament sessions, which he often turns into a kind of mockery even of the representatives, but after the generational displacement of the founding fathers, a surprising harmony occurred between him and Al-Maliki when Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani assumed the presidency of the government.[/size]
[size=45]After Halbousi was dismissed from the presidency of Parliament in late 2023, by a decision of the Federal Court, the traditional political forces headed to search for a new alternative, and put forward the name of the “veteran” Mahmoud Al-Mashhadani, as part of a complex deal that included a rare agreement between Al-Maliki and Al-Halbousi.[/size]
[size=45]Observers tend to believe that Al-Mashhadani's return to the position of Parliament Speaker whets the appetite of Al-Maliki's supporters to talk about the latter's return to the position of Prime Minister, in the next legislative elections, in 2025.[/size]
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