Iraq will elect a new parliament after a bitterly disputed election in July, the country’s electoral commission said on Wednesday. The announcement comes after an attempt to annul the election failed last week and came less than a week after an independent judicial commission released results of partial recounting of votes.
The results of a partial recount show the Baghdad bloc of Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi — of Shiite and secular tendencies — extending its lead, while a Sunni bloc led by Khaled al-Obeidi has made the biggest gains in the south.
On Tuesday, President Trump signaled support for Abadi, a fellow Sunni.
“I have had a call with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi and they are putting together a fantastic team for Iraq,” he said. “The elections were a tremendous step forward.”
Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who led the country for eight years until 2014, also welcomed the results.
“Shiite and Kurdish political blocs get 57 seats, Sunnis 26, Kurds 16,” he wrote on Twitter. “Iraqi govt has a majiiba (ministry) size of 20,000 (a million people), and 54 deputies in parliament (175 seats).”
He added that he “will return to politics so as to come back to power to serve the beloved Iraqi people.”
In its announcement, the Iraqi electoral commission said it had ended its investigation into the partial recount of votes, and that it would announce the results in the coming days.
It had announced last week that more than 50 candidates had been disqualified after the results were released.
The Hama al-Islam bloc of President Bashar al-Assad, along with a number of other groups, had sought to annul the election, arguing that fraud led to the result, which showed Abadi’s bloc expanding its lead.
While the results are unlikely to quell the current ethnic and sectarian violence in Iraq, they are widely seen as a step toward the kind of political unity necessary to stabilize the country.
Read the full story at The Guardian.
Related
‘My country is humiliated.’ Why the election results in Iraq have two sides cheering and those not
A look at the other stolen election in Africa: Ghana’s