Ali Al Zaidi was named prime minister-designate more than a month ago, and it’s been more than a week since his appointment was confirmed. Yet in all this time, the businessman-turned-politician has managed to fill just 60 per cent of his cabinet berths.
This and the fact that it took five months after the general election, which was held last November, for Parliament to even agree on Mr Al Zaidi’s name should give us a good idea of just how dysfunctional Iraqi politics is today.
But that’s not all.
Earlier this month, within weeks of being named prime minister-designate, Mr Al Zaidi submitted a programme to Parliament in which he has laid out his agenda for the country. But this manifesto of sorts is an excellent illustration of the vacuity of Iraqi national politics – of how totally devoid of policy debate it has become, and how the interests of the general population remain secondary to the political groups that control the state.
The programme is so thin on substance that it looks like it was developed by an AI model that was prompted to develop a meaningless list of bullet points that would not commit the government to any specific policy action.
Before getting into the content of the programme, it’s important to lay out some context.
There are many parliamentary systems in the world, and to each its own particular rules. In most systems, political parties adopt their manifestos well before elections are held. They campaign on the basis of those manifestos and, if they win, seek to implement some or all of their goals.
In Iraq, many parties make campaign promises, but most pledges are indistinguishable from the other. There are no left-wing or right-wing parties in the country. Almost all of them are socially conservative; none have taxation policies; and they only differ substantively on two issues: foreign policy and the autonomous status of the Kurdistan Region.
In Iraq’s elections, the largest party or list of candidates usually ends up with no more than 10 per cent of the seats and is nowhere near being able to form a government on its own. Coalition talks are therefore inevitable, but they are usually personality-driven – including whether certain political figures will accept being subordinate to others, or whether they are allocated portfolios that are sufficiently prestigious. Policy discussions are, for the most part, absent.
Following last November’s election, the largest coalition of parties – the Co-ordination Framework – was unable to agree on a prime ministerial candidate from within. So it settled on Mr Al Zaidi, a relatively unknown businessman who has reportedly amassed a fortune from government contracts. And while he wasted little time in starting negotiations with all the major groups over the formation of his government, he has yet to fill the most crucial cabinet positions – including those of defence and interior ministers – even as Iraq runs the risk of being destabilised by the Iran war.
This obviously also means that none of his cabinet colleagues will have participated in the drafting of his development agenda.
Without a political base of his own, Mr Al Zaidi cannot hope to impose a programme on his cabinet. In fact, the manner in which the programme was submitted is a tacit admission of how meaningless the exercise is. With minor exceptions, his own ministers are likely to stonewall his agenda. The programme, which they played no part in drafting, will probably never be referred to for the remainder of the government’s term.
A cursory glance at the programme itself suggests that despite his status as a complete outsider, Mr Al Zaidi has failed to bring new energy or thinking to the process.
The structure of the document all but guarantees that the government will remain unfocused. Eleven pages long, it includes 14 sections covering more than a hundred issues, all of which are listed as priorities of equal importance. It is usually the case that when a government prioritises everything, it ends up accomplishing nothing.
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Iraqi election workers count ballots in Baghdad after an early voting day for security forces and displaced people in the country's national parliamentary election. EPA -
The early voting day on Sunday took took place two days before polls open to the public across the country on Tuesday. AFP -
Members of the security forces stand guard outside a polling station in Mosul. Reuters -
A policeman checks comrades arriving to vote at a polling station in Baghdad. EPA -
Displaced Iraqis prepare to cast their vote at a polling station in the Debaga camp east of Makhmur, in northern Iraq. AFP -
A policeman flashes the V sign while standing in the queue to vote in Baghdad. EPA
A more effective approach would have been to establish a small list of priorities and then set up the institutional mechanisms necessary to ensure that the cabinet regularly follows up on the implementation of those priorities. A programme lacking in focus is another reason Mr Al Zaidi’s government will, at best, be treading water.
The content also demonstrates how detached Iraq’s governing elites are from the general population’s needs.
Issues that citizens consistently rank as being priority issues – health care, education, poverty and unemployment – all appear close to the end of the document, without offering details on how to fix them. Instead, the document merely states that the government will pursue “legislation reform”, without providing any indication on what that reform might consist of. The early sections all relate to managing power struggles between the various groups that are likely to control the cabinet, including setting up reporting lines within the security and foreign policy realms.
The programme is also jarring for the issues that it doesn’t include, most prominent among them being judicial reform. In genuinely democratic societies, the proper functioning of the courts through legislative action is a constant priority. But for Mr Al Zaidi, the courts are apparently out of bounds – which is probably a reflection of the internal politics that is particular to Iraq, in which the head of the Supreme Judicial Council, the administrative body of the judiciary, is a politically dominant figure. The result is that the courts have now become fiefdoms that are immune to electoral outcomes.
All of this suggests that even though ordinary Iraqis may have thought they were granting electoral legitimacy to a new Parliament when they went out to vote last November, it is clear that their interests do not feature in the new government’s agenda. Perhaps they should take comfort in the possibility that a government that is unable to formulate meaningful policy will have little bearing on their lives anyway.
