Malikis Plurality Adds To His Woes

The initial tally of Iraq’s provincial election results seems to have turned Iraqi politics on its head.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki scored a big immediate win at the expense of many of Iraq’s traditional local powerbrokers. Yet this seeming victory may mean less than it seems.

Here is what we can say for sure:

Until now, the Iraqi Supreme Islamic Council led by the Hakim family looked like the invincible leader of Iraq’s Shiites. Now they have been trounced. In Baghdad, for example, the Hakims won 55% of the vote in the 2005 provincial elections. This time they took only 5.4%. 

Even in the province of Najaf, the very heart of Shia conservatism and the home of the Hakims, where ISCI controlled almost half the seats of the provincial council and boasted a very active and effective governor and deputy governor (who headed their slate for this round), the Hakims could only muster just under 15 percent of the vote.

The other two major losses for the Hakims were the economically-promising and populous provinces of Basra and Dhi Qar (Nassiriya) where they saw their share of the vote drop by 37 points and 16 points respectively.

Another Islamist party, the Fadhila Party, a dissident offshoot of the movement led by the Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, has been effectively eradicated from the political scene altogether.

Parties like ISCI and Fadhila lost their ground to the list sponsored by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who was rewarded by the voters for crushing the Sadrists in the military campaign of 2008. It is no accident that Maliki’s best numbers were in Baghdad and Basra with just under 40 percent of the total; two cities that had faced the brunt of Sadrist lawlessness, militias, and organized crime.

Maliki ran on a platform of Iraqi patriotism and restoring law and order. For most of his career, Maliki was a marginal figure even within his own party, but an accidental confluence of events in 2006 brought him the premiership. His military successes in 2008 have now confirmed his leadership.

But Maliki’s support rests on a narrow base. The party in which he began his career, the Da’awa are secretive and strongly ideological grouping of a few hundred members organized along Leninist lines but with a very un-Leninist mission to undermine secularism and propagate Islam. In the years since 2006 Maliki failed or was unwilling to build himself a broader party.

This week’s success in the provincial elections may delude Maliki that no further effort is necessary.  

In the short term, Maliki has gained. He may now feel positioned to dictate political terms to the Hakims and other rivals.

The head of the Hakim family, Abdel-Aziz al-Hakim, is gravely sick with cancer, and the succession of his son Ammar to the leadership of ISCI is in dispute. ISCI will probably fragment as some of its leading figures who had enjoyed national exposure as a result of the high governmental positions they have held since the fall of the Saddam regime will go their own way, forming offshoots much like what had happened to Da’awa.

Meanwhile, the Da’awa will do what the Da’awa does best: burrowing into the dark mole holes of the Iraqi state and its levers of power. Yet they would be gravely mistaken by interpreting their success as the electorate’s validation of what the Da’awa stands for: this victory was Maliki’s alone, and whatever fluctuations of sentiment the irascibly fickle Iraqi voters have for in store for him will also take its toll on Da’awa’s salad days in power. In a few months time, security may become a forgotten priority of Iraqis, who were quick to forget, as traumatized nations are known to do, the cruelties of Saddam, and they may focus on immediate concerns such as the woeful lack of services and a tanking economy, both items that Maliki and the provincial councils he has brought to foreÑnewly empowered with landmark legislation devolving immense powers to the local levelÑare unlikely to deliver on due to the Da’awa’s characteristic parochial approach to management, and the shortness of time, ahead of the next contest whereby the popularity of incumbency is tested. Gratitude over breaking the Sadrists can only go so far; popular gripe shall take its toll on Maliki’s numbers ahead of the national election, and it’s safe to say that Maliki has had his best showing, and is likely to lose a margin of supporters over the next few months.

In understanding where all this is going, it is crucial to understand that although Maliki did exceedingly well, nowhere was he able to demonstrate a majority. All he has are solid pluralities but that’s not enough to govern without partnering up. Maliki has few options among the Shias; the Hakims will be sulking for a long time to come, while the Sadrists are not likely to let bygones be bygones, and even so, they have been reduced to marginal political factions representing impoverished urban outsiders, ratcheting up numbers similar to those of a marginal Shia sect in Basra (around 5 percent), and losing Maysan (whose elections they contested and won in 2005) by 22 points. A rival Da’awa faction led by former Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Ja’afari did far better than expected, scoring above 5 percent in five provinces, won’t reconcile with him and will end up challenging him within Da’awa ranks at every turn.

Beyond the parliamentary elections and given Iraq’s demographics, Maliki will need a Sunni and a Kurdish partner to be able to form future coalition cabinet, granted that he manages to hold on to most of his voters by the end of the year. Even though great strides have been made to tone down sectarianism, it will remain the case that very few Sunnis and Kurds would consider voting for a Da’awa Party leader.

The natural candidate as Maliki’s Sunni partner would have been the Islamic Party, which had begun to play a role akin to that of the Hakims among the Sunnis under the shrewd leadership of its chairman, Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi, but now must face the aftermath of a clobbering at the polls. The IP was dealt a staggering blow across Iraq, but it was most painful in the two Sunni provinces that really matter: Anbar, where they scored just 16 percent, and in Ninevah (Mosul) where they walked away with a measly 6.7 percent. Coming from a position of strength and incumbency, the IP is not expected to reverse these losses in the run-up to the national elections, rendering the party a has-been.

 The IP was defeated by two sets of coalitions; that of neo-Ba’athists and another built around the model of provincial notables and urbane tribal leaders. Contrary to the first round of analysis, traditional Sunni tribal leaders fared poorly at the polls, and the only ones who made headway were those that re-invented themselves as can-do businessmen and administrators. The two signature issues that resonate with Sunni voters seem to be hostility towards Iran’s interference in Iraqi affairs, and a rolling back of the De-Ba’athification decrees. Yet even though Maliki cannot be counted as an Iranian lackey, he would have a hard time finding common political ground upon which to build an alliance with these emerging Sunni players, especially since reneging on De-Ba’athification is personally odious to him and could cost him plenty of Shia votes.

The defeat of ISCI and the Islamic Party leaves the Kurds in a lurch. The Kurdish alliance with the Hakims is a long-standing one, to which they had added the Islamic Party as the latter grew into prominence and began speaking for the Sunnis. This alliance is no more, and substituting Maliki for ISCI is a long-shot given the collision course that the Kurds and Maliki have been on for some time as he tried to foster the control of the central state at the expense of their federal autonomy. There’s also a personal aspect to this tension: Masoud Barzani, the president of the Kurdish region, looks upon Maliki much as the Hakims do, and would be unwilling to accommodate a confident upstart.

Secular Shias and Sunni liberals (that is, anti-Ba’athists) made negligible gains. Former prime minister and Ba’athist apologist Ayad Allawi was the big vote earner in this category, and even though he pulled off a respectable 8.7 percent in Baghdad (compare that to the Sadrist 9 percent, given their bastion of Sadr City where a third of the capital’s population lives), it still does not translate into viability in politics. Iraq’s most compelling liberal politician Mithal al-Alusi only managed to win 1.6 percent of the vote in Baghdad, far lower than expected. It is reasonable to conclude that liberalism, certainly not exhibited by a guy like Allawi, still has a long way to go before leaving its mark on Iraq’s trajectory.

Emboldened by these results, Maliki will attempt to run on his own slate for the parliamentary elections. His attempts at expanding his base will be counteracted by the inability of the Da’awa Party in which he is enmeshed to draw in new, ideologically varying talent. His inability to deliver on the high expectations of improved services and stamping out corruption will further erode his standing, yet he is still likely to a win a plurality of the vote. But pluralities are a tricky thing when your rivals, so crucial to building a parliamentary majority, are out to bring you down. Maliki won, but not by enough. The political spectrum produced new faces and eclipsed established figures, but nevertheless expanded political fragmentation. Maliki is simply not enough of an able statesman to cobble all this dissonanceÑreflective of a vibrant, young democracyÑinto political coherency, and it is far from being a foregone conclusion to see him holding on to his job in 2010.