Iraq to hold parliamentary elections on November 11

Previous poll in 2021 was followed by year-long stalemate over formation of new government

A polling station in Baghdad's Sadr district during Iraq's parliamentary election in October 2021. EPA

Iraq's cabinet set November 11 as the date for the next parliamentary election during a session on Wednesday, a government statement said.

The elections will be the sixth parliamentary vote since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

Iraq's last general election, in October 2021, was held a year early in response to one of the core demands of a nationwide, pro-reform protest movement that began in 2019 in central and southern parts of the country. But bitter rivalry among political elites, mainly among the country’s majority Shiites, delayed the process of forming a government until October 2022.

Shiite cleric and political leader Moqtada Al Sadr's efforts to form the government failed, despite his Sadrist bloc making a strong showing by winning 73 of the 329 seats in Parliament.

His desire to form a majority government only with Sunni and Kurdish parties upset his rivals in the Co-ordination Framework, an umbrella group of Iran-backed militias and political parties that suffered major losses in the election.

In June 2022, Mr Al Sadr ordered his MPs to resign from Parliament and to withdraw from the country's political process until it was purged of what he described as “the corrupt”.

There are no indications yet whether Mr Al Sadr will take part in the upcoming election.

The 2021 elections were held with a new electoral law the MPs adopted after the pro-reform 2019 October protests. That law divided each province into small electoral districts with the winner being the party with the highest number of votes. That move gave new independent parties - many of which were supported by protesters - a stronger chance of winning seats in the 329-seat parliament in 2021 elections.

However in March 2023, the parliament endorsed controversial amendments despite objections from protesters and independent politicians. These amendments could make it harder for independent candidates and small parties to compete against big parties and to reach the legislative body.

These latest amendments return the law to the modified Sainte Lague system introduced in 2014, which uses a complicated formula to apportion seats and tends to favour established parties. They also reverse a key change in the 2019 law, reducing the number of constituencies from 83 to 18 which is one district for each governorate.

It is still unclear if the parliament will change the parliamentary representation based on the results of Iraq’s national census held late last year and showed the country’s population stood at 45.4 million, up from 43 million. Iraq’s High Electoral Commission spokeswoman Jumana Al Ghalai told The National that the number of the seats needs to be modified in a new law.