Iraq the Vote
A big election turnout, but is it a turning point?
All the familiar ingredients were there in this latest Iraqi election: deserted streets manned by newbie Iraqi forces; paper ballots of a Flintstonian proportion, listing dozens of coalitions and thousands of candidates; fingers stained with indelible purple ink, signifying that Iraqis had once again cast their ballots.
This time, however, the stakes were high, and Iraqi pols were playing for keeps. Unlike the year's two earlier votes, in which Iraqis elected a lame-duck transitional government and approved a constitution, in this election, Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds slogged to the polls (often miles away, with driving prohibited for security reasons) to elect a permanent four-year Council of Representatives.
And they came in droves . Election officials estimated that 11 million of Iraq's 15 million registered voters cast a ballot, putting the nation's voter turnout at over 70 percent--and as high as 80 percent in the heart of the Shiite-dominated south. The process seemed to go quite smoothly, though it was certainly not without a few glitches. Some voters found that the polling stations in their neighborhoods had run out of ballots and boxes. Others were turned away for having registered at a different polling place. Khadder Hussein, an election official stationed at al-Shimaa girls secondary school in Mosul, said that some people tried to vote for absent family members. "They come here with their family's ID cards, and they want to vote for all their family members," said Hussein, speaking through an interpreter. "They are not sure exactly how elections work."
On the eve of the voting, U.S. troops visited the polling stations to ensure they had been secured but largely stayed out of sight on election day. In the run-up to the vote, there were warnings of sectarian violence and the threat of voter intimidation, but insurgents did not stop the elections.
What remains to be seen now is whether elections can stop the insurgents. "There's this tendency in the West to believe that the insurgency is linked to Iraqi politics," says Michael Rubin, an Iraq expert at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington. "As much as the White House would like to set a milestone, we're not going to realize what the turning point was until a year or two after the fact. We have to stop looking for a watershed moment."
Election day itself was largely peaceful by the violent standards of this war-torn land, but whether or not these elections will bring sustained peace and stability largely depends on how the power is divvied up in the new parliament. The religious Shiite coalition is likely to dominate the parliament again. Predictably, Kurdish politicians took the Kurdish vote, which is about 20 percent of the population, as they had in previous elections.
Alliances. But this time, Sunni coalitions, some said to represent insurgent interests, are in the political mix. Relaxing in his front yard with a hookah the day after the election, Ibrahim Muthana, a Sunni college student, says that Sunni politicians need to stick together if they want to have an impact in parliament. "Instead of being on one strong slate, they divided into six weak slates," he said, referring to the fractured Sunni coalitions. "My wish is that the Sunnis who win seats in parliament will ally themselves to have power [and be] listened to."
Actual results are not expected to be announced for two weeks, after which the parliament will convene to form a new government. For the next four years, it will be a "democracy without stability," says Rubin. "We're going to have ever shifting coalitions." That, at the very least, is democratic.
With Julian E. Barnes and Amer Saleh
This story appears in the December 26, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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