ABSTRACT
This chapter clarifies how the electoral system in post-2003 Iraq affected the patterns of coalition-building among the political elites and the tactics of the political parties to gain trans-governorate votes to win a majority. The main purpose of the analysis is to cast doubt on “sectarian-ness” as a precondition for the formation of political blocs in national and governorate elections, and to show how the major electoral blocs attempted to co-opt groups with diverse interests and social origins.
This chapter picks up the cases of the United Iraqi Alliance (UIA) and Iraqiyya, leading electoral blocs from 2005 to 2010 and their succeeding electoral blocs. The question raised here is why it was possible for these blocs to succeed in retaining wide trans-governorate supportive constituencies in the parliamentary elections, which gave them the image of representing sectarian constituencies (“UIA for Shiʻa and Iraqiyya for Sunnis”), while the results of governorate elections showed a different picture and was more revealing of their manner of recruiting partners.
What was disclosed in the transformation of the patterns of coalition-building was that the main fault line in Iraq during 2009–2010 coincided with the centre–local conflicts, rather than sectarian differences. This period can be recalled as a brief period of a tendency toward de-sectarianisation in search for countrywide national unity, sandwiched between demographic sectarianism and securitising sectarianism.
