ERBIL, Iraq —
Parliament in
Iraq’s autonomous northern Kurdistan region voted Sunday to
extend its term by a year, postponing polls against a backdrop of a wider
national political paralysis.
اضافة اعلان
Legislative
elections in Kurdistan had been due this month, four years after the last vote.
Amid disagreements
between its two major parties, lawmakers will now stay until a new parliament
is elected in late 2023.
Eighty out of 111
representatives voted for the measure, the regional parliament said in a
statement, with members of the opposition abstaining.
The delay is the
result of disputes between the
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) over the delineation of electoral
constituencies.
But it also is part
of a broader power struggle between the parliament’s two biggest parties, said
Shivan Fazil, a researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute.
KDP, which controls
the regional government, has challenged PUK’s claim for the presidency of Iraq,
which by convention is held by a member of Iraq’s Kurdish minority. The PUK has
held the largely symbolic post since 2005.
“Lack of
cooperation and consensus between the two parties at the federal level ... has
increasingly led to a lack of cooperation and consensus” in Kurdistan too,
Fazil said.
The parliament has
extended its term several times in recent decades over political disagreements,
and in the 1990s due to fighting between two rival clans, the KDP-affiliated
Barzanis and the PUK-affiliated Talabanis.
The UN envoy to
Iraq,
Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, warned this week that “the political fallout”
of not conducting timely elections and “neglecting basic democratic principles
will bear a high cost”.
“Monopolizing power
breeds instability,” she told the Security Council on Tuesday. “That goes for
both Iraq as a whole and for the Kurdistan region.”
Kurdish officials
have painted the region as a haven of stability in conflict-ridden Iraq. It is
home to several international charities and has developed its infrastructure
and projects at a faster pace than the rest of the country.
But activists and
opposition figures have decried corruption, arbitrary arrests and intimidation
of protesters.
The region has also
been caught in the crosshairs of geopolitical conflict among neighboring
countries, having recently been the target of strikes by both Iran and Turkey.
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