NOW that the Shiite United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), with 140 of the 275 seats in the new Parliament, has picked him as its choice, it is fairly certain that Ibrahim Jaafari will become Iraq’s first elected prime minister. That the outgoing interim Premier Iyad Allawi is trying to form a coalition administration should not be taken as a sign that Iraq’s political factions have already fallen to squabbling. Horse-trading and compromise deal-making are what democratic politics is all about and Iraq is supposed now to be a democracy.
The mathematics however would seem to be against the outgoing premier. Even if, and it is a big if, he could convince the Kurdish parties to add their 75 seats to his own secular Iraqi List’s 40 seats, he would still be outnumbered by UIA legislators. Even were he then able to persuade any of the parties in the UIA to break ranks and join him, he would still seem unlikely to be sure of the two-thirds majority necessary to vote in the new constitution which is the primary job of this government. The Kurds will calculate that though they might prefer the secular party as an ally, their long-term interests lie in working with the UIA.
Jaafari is a popular politician and, as head of one of the largest Shiite parties, he is likely to enjoy the confidence of more than the 48 percent of electors who voted the UIA ticket. Allawi has always suffered from the fact that he and his interim government were always seen as puppets of the Americans who appointed them. It is notable the Jaafari’s role as vice president has been largely symbolic and he is not associated with the old administration.
Like Allawi, Jaafari has made a point of insisting that whoever forms the new government will be working for all Iraqis, including the Sunnis, a majority of whom did not vote.
There are two things against which all the newly elected leaders should guard. The first is that the Americans will still seek, despite their protestations of neutrality, to have a hand in steering the direction of Iraqi politics. America has taken on daunting obligations in bringing peace to Iraq, but the country’s new leaders must not be made to pay a price for this self-assumed burden.
The second danger is that the largely Sunni insurgents and their Al-Qaeda allies will seek to exploit rifts among the elected Shiite political parties. Nobody is expecting all Iraqi politicians to agree all the time, except on one crucial condition and that is that Iraq must be governed fairly as a diverse society in which no single faction, however powerful, can ignore the needs of the other communities.
Therefore Allawi’s probably doomed attempt to form a coalition will be an interesting test of the freshly established political processes. In throwing his hat into the ring, he has behaved with political decorum and praised Jaafari’s qualities. Though politicians on various sides will be tempted to indulge in mudslinging, as long as senior figures preserve a sense of proportion and fairness, this early rivalry for power should not be causing anyone to despair.
