Coalition Forming Time

A coalition of Shiite parties won 128 of 275 seats in last month's parliamentary elections, falling 10 votes short of a majority, Iraqi election officials announced today.

The results mean that the Shiite group will remain the dominant force in Iraq's new government, but will still need to form a coalition.

In second place came a coalition of Kurdish parties, who took 53 seats. The largest Sunni party, the Iraqi Accordance Front, won 44 seats and another Sunni party won 11.

A party headed by former prime minister Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite, took 25 seats.

The Sunnis will have more representatives in the new parliament than they did in the old, whose elections they mostly boycotted last January.

The Shiite and Kurdish coalitions will hold 40 fewer seats between them than in the old parliament. Nevertheless, their vote totals put them within a few votes of the two-thirds needed to form a new government.

Iraq the Model has the full breakdown of the seats won by the various parties and coalitions. While the election results have been pretty much given a thumbs up for fairness, Iraq the Model also cautions people to remember that democracy is a process, not an event.

Actually one of our biggest problems is the lack of trust between the different parties and more dangerous is the little trust the parties have in democracy. This trust crisis is what causes those irrational reactions. The Shia politicians, although they are the biggest winners in the elections are still behaving like victims and they worry about whether this or that Sunni candidate was part of the Ba’ath party. And the same applies to the Sunni who are afraid of Shia domination despite the fact that their (the Sunni) parties will control nearly 30% of the parliament and there’s no chance they can be marginalized again.

Not only that, both sides say they’re being conspired upon by the others. This lack of trust will keep being a problem for Iraq…I’m not expecting politicians to trust each other but I hope they mature to trust democracy.