WASHINGTON, Dec. 25 (UPI) -- The full official results of Iraq's Dec. 15 parliamentary election will not be certified until mid-January 2006, but it was clear long before the actual voting that this would be an election where most Iraqis would have to vote for the few names they knew at the top of a ticket -- and make a choice between key national, ethnic, and sectarian parties -- without really knowing what a given party ticket or leader really stood for in any detail.
Most Iraqis never saw the candidate lists in full before they went to the polls. The number of candidates also vastly exceeded the number of offices. Not only were most of the major parties mixes of very different voices and beliefs, but there were 7.655 candidates on 996 candidate lists, 307 political entities (single candidates and political parties), and 19 coalitions. In Baghdad, for example, the ballot paper had 106 candidate lists with 2,161 candidates for 59 seats in the Council of Representatives. There were 212 political contestants on the national ballot.
In spite of this diversity, it was clear that the election had to focus around a few key parties:
-- United Iraqi Alliance or Unified Iraqi Coalition, #555: Shiite. Led by Abd al-Aziz al-Hakim. This mixed Hakim's Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), Moqtada al-Sadr's group, Al Dawa, and the group led by then Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari.
-- Iraqi Front for National Dialogue or Hewar National Iraqi Front: Salih al-Mutlaq heads this list and split the Iraqi Dialogue Council because he opposed the constitution. The list includes five such political groups.
-- Iraqi Accordance Front or Tawfoq Iraqi Front, #618: Sunni. Led by Adnan al-Dulaymi and Tariq al-Hashimi. Included three Sunni parties that boycotted the Jan. 30, 2005 election: National Dialogue Council, Iraq Islamic Party (Hashimi), and Iraqi People's Conference. Supported amending constitution, weakening federalism, eliminating Shiite and Kurdish dominated Iraq forces, liberalizing admission of former Ba'athists to political process.
-- Iraqi National List or National Iraqi List, #731: Shiite & Sunni. Led by Iyad Allawi (Prime Minister is previous government.) Includes Independent Democrats Grouping, National Democratic Party, and Communist Party.
-- Kurdistan Coalition List or Kurdistan Gathering, # 730: Kurdish. Led by Mas'ud Barzani and Jalal Tababani (then President). Combined the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). Smaller Kurdish, Turcoman, and Chaldean Christian elements.
-- National Congress Coalition, #569: Largely Shiite but some Sunnis. Led by Ahmad Chalabi (then a Deputy Prime Minister. Includes Constitutional Monarchy Movement. Mix of religious and secular voices.
The preliminary results of the election provided few surprises. The results were highly polarized and in ways that provided few signs of corruption or falsifying the results in ways that would have a major impact on the most probable result:
-- The Shiites dominated the south, and had a majority in nine provinces, with a total of 81 seats, as well as in Baghdad, which has a total of 59 seats.
-- The Sunni had a majority in four provinces, which had a total of 46 seats
-- The Kurds had a majority in four provinces which had a total of 44 seats
-- The secular or nationalist parties did not have a majority in a single province.
At the same time, the vote was mixed in many governorates, (a caution against)the dangers of assuming that Iraq can easily be divided into federations, or separated along sectarian and ethnic lines. There also was a significant secular or nationalist voice in many Shiite provinces. At least five governorates emerged as so mixed that any division by sect or ethnicity might well trigger ethnic cleansing or civil war, and they had a total of 115 seats -- half of those elected by governorate.
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(Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair of Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC. This is taken from his latest CSIS paper "The Impact of the Iraqi Election: A Working Analysis.")
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