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January 31, 2005
Iraqi exit polls
Officials in the United Iraqi Alliance believe their bloc of mainly Shi'ite parties has won almost half of the 275 assembly seats, based on their own exit polls and 13,000 monitors.Iraqis may have to wait days for the Electoral Commission to declare the results, but if those projections are correct, the Alliance could link with smaller parties to build a two-thirds majority in parliament, enough to choose Iraq's new leaders.
Party exit polls suggest voters ignored most of the 111 choices on their bulky and bewildering ballot papers and plumped for one of three main blocs in contention for power.
A Kurdish grouping is expected to come second behind the United Iraqi Alliance, with a secular bloc led by Shi'ite interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi likely to take third place.
If Sistani's list really got more than one third of the votes, that prevents anyone from choosing the new leaders without their support. So will they ally themselves with the Kurds, who are suspicious of most things Arab, or with Allawi's group which has accused them of being agents of Iran and threatened to arrest members of their list? It should make for some interesting horse trading indeed. I suspect that between the autonomy-minded Kurds in the north, the autonomy-minded Shia in the south, and the wary Sunnis in the west, many of whom did boycott the election, we will not see a strong central government, but several stronger regional governments, instead.
Here are some details from the report:
Even politicians who doubt that the Alliance will gain 50 percent of assembly seats acknowledge it will be well-placed to form a ruling coalition, perhaps with Kurdish groups.The Alliance has dominated the bulk of the mostly Shi'ite south, even its tribal areas, and some parts of Baghdad, including Sadr City and mixed Sunni-Shi'ite neighbourhoods such as Dora and Shaab, according to unofficial party estimates.
Allawi's group did well in Baghdad, Sunni provinces and southern pockets, such as traditionally secular Nassiriya.
The likelihood that no single party will dominate the assembly will mean extensive horse-trading before a prime minister is chosen. Allawi is not out of the running.
"We have won 85 percent in the south and a strong majority in Baghdad. Lots of votes have been already counted and this is what they show," said an independent member in the Alliance.
Meshan al-Jiboury, a Sunni candidate from Mosul, said Sunnis largely shunned the polls, citing the mixed Duluiya region on the Tigris river north of Baghdad, where he said only a few hundred Sunnis voted compared to as many as 60,000 Shi'ites.
"It seems the Alliance will pull it off and Finance Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi could become prime minister, but he will have to work with democratic and Sunni forces suspicious of the Iranian bent of his bloc," Jibouri told Reuters.
Posted by Mike at January 31, 2005 11:31 AM
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