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Iraq | ||
Allawi edges ahead of PM again in Iraq election | ||
2010-03-21 | ||
[Al Arabiya Latest] Secularist Iyad Allawi edged ahead of Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki on Saturday in a neck-and-neck election race that has laid bare the ethnic and sectarian divisions threatening Iraq's fragile stability. The new results from Iraq's electoral commission, with about 93 percent of an early vote count complete, gave a lead of some 8,000 votes to Allawi, a Shiite former prime minister with wide support among minority Sunnis who fear consolidation of the dominance of Shiite religious parties in Iraq since 2003. The lead in the popular vote has changed hands several times and the eventual winner may be able to claim a symbolic victory, but no matter the final result both Maliki and Allawi's will need to engage in long and potentially divisive talks to try to form a coalition capable of forming a government. As early results trickle in after the March 7 polls, the divided vote is a reminder of Iraq's precarious position on the seventh anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion that ousted Saddam Hussein and plunged Iraq into a bloody civil conflict.
A close election may actually exacerbate those threats by making it harder to form a government coalition and accommodate the conflicting visions, and personal political ambitions, of groups as dissimilar as Maliki's mainly Shiite State of Law coalition and Allawi's cross-sectarian Iraqiya list.
The prime minister now has a narrow 6-percent lead over Allawi in Baghdad, the diverse capital city, but he has virtually no support in largely Sunni provinces where many are skeptical of his Shiite Islamist roots and condemn his support of a ban of hundreds of candidates, including prominent Sunnis. Allawi, who has tried to model himself as a non-sectarian outsider, swept western and northern areas home to large numbers of Sunni Arabs. The physician and fluent English speaker holds a narrow lead over a Kurdish bloc in Kirkuk, the disputed city that is Iraq's northern oil hub. | ||
Posted by:Fred |