Iraqiyya Loses a Seat in Diyala, and Probably Keeps It

Lists of the 52 de-Baathified candidates have now begun circulating and it has been confirmed that in addition to Ibrahim al-Mutlak, the replacement candidate for Salih al-Mutlak in Baghdad, another member of Iraqiyya originally from the Hiwar bloc, Raad Hamid Kazim Awwad al-Bayati, candidate number 7 in Diyala, has been subjected to the de-Baathification ruling.

With respect to Mutlak, it seems futile to try to recalculate Baghdad in a detailed way given the high number of candidates and the recount that is underway. However, Mutlak only accounts for some 5,700 of the 841,700 votes of Iraqiyya in Baghdad and their non-winning candidates there have low personal scores so it does not matter much if some of them may be among the 52 – the exclusion of Mutlak’s votes in itself seems unlikely to change the total seats for Iraqiyya . That said, of course, this is still theft of votes of the most brazen and outrageous kind.

Much the same can be said in Diyala, although here the race is closer and it may be worth trying a recalculation. The excluded candidate for Iraqiyya got 11,991 personal votes which is quite substantial, but apparently, based on a very hasty check, no more INM candidates here are among the 52. So total votes in the governorate is reduced to around 490,905 and the electoral divider is adjusted from 38,684 to around 37,761 (depending, of course on the exclusion of non-winning candidates, which however are likely to produce smaller changes). Still, however, the initial allocation is the same: 1 seat for INA, 6 for INM, 1 for SLA, 1 for KA. Then in the second allocation, the INM share of the votes is slightly reduced from 55% to 54% but still sufficient to ensure 2 seats in the second allocation, thus ending up with 8 seats as was the case before the subtraction of the votes for Raad al-Bayati.

In sum, Diyala might be an example of the de-Baathification process creating lots of ill feeling and long delays, but maybe not so much in the way of a changed parliamentary arithmetic.

PS It should be added that the way comments from Ali al-Lami have been juxtaposed to the names of the 52 candidates in some press reports may have created the impression that 8 or 9 Iraqiyya candidates are confirmed as having lost their seats. This is not the case; Lami apparently refers to a separate batch of exclusion orders submitted on top of the 52 others (which he hopes to exclude) and the outcome of this has apparently not been decided by the electoral judicial board.  Though one wonders why Mr. Lami can never seem to get his business done by way of a single dispatch.