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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.
It's not precarious in the least. There's little chance of a Sunni thug taking power. The Kurds aren't going to break off. Iran is meddling but even most Shi'a don't want them running the place. The squabble is going to be the usual political finagling, with the exception that the Iraqi pols are likely to be more honorable than Nancy Pelosi.
Iraq may have held one of the most competitive elections in the region's history, but the course of its democracy is far from certain. It is far safer than it was at the peak of sectarian killing, but a tenacious insurgency keeps Iraq under siege just as U.S. troops halve their force by this summer.

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.
Nonsense. Maliki and Allawi can form a coalition and work together. They'll just have to figure out who gets what ministries.
Maliki, who has won over many Iraqis with his nationalist rhetoric and steps to crush sectarian violence in Iraq, leads in seven provinces in central and southern Iraq, six of them mainly Shiite.

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

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