There’s much speculation going on about the selection of the Prime Minister of the Shiite and Kurdish National Assembly. A couple of items to remember.
Parties have three days after election ballots are released to challenge the results. Al Jazeera reports today that the Iraqi Independent Electoral Commission has received six complaints from political groups challenging the results of the January 30th elections.
Even before the results were announced, the commission had received some 359 complaints from inside and outside Iraq; not only from political groups but also from tribal congregations and citizens who weren’t able to vote.
There have been serious allegations of voting irregularities especially around the northern city of Mosul, further complicating the count. Some leading Sunni Arab and Christian politicians have stated that thousands of their supporters were denied the right to vote.
Considering that it took them two weeks to count the ballots in the first place, there’s no telling how long it will take to sort through all the challenges.
Adel al-Lami, an official with the electoral commission said, “We received six complaints until now, but there are other complaints sent by e-mail and we haven’t retrieved them yet.”
That email retrieval is hard work!
Second, the rule about how a Prime Minister is to be chosen:
When the votes are counted, the Iraqi people will have elected a 275-member Transitional National Assembly. The Assembly will:
- Serve as Iraq’s national legislature.
- Name a Presidency Council, consisting of a President and two Vice Presidents. (By unanimous agreement, the Presidency Council will appoint a Prime Minister and, on his recommendation, cabinet ministers.)
- Draft Iraq’s new constitution, which will be presented to the Iraqi people for their approval in a national referendum in October 2005. Under the new constitution, Iraq will elect a permanent government in December 2005.
So, whoever ends up on the “Presidency Council” must be elected by the Assembly. That means there must be an Assembly before there is a PM and although we all know there will be jockeying and horse trading behind the scenes the Assembly still has to vote for three people who will unanimously choose a PM.
At this point, we don’t even know the names of the candidates who were elected and we don’t know how the challenges to the balloting will be settled, so although it might be amusing to speculate on the identity of the Prime Minister candidates, choosing that person is the last step of a very ambiguous and complicated process.