The Iraqi Left at a Crossroads

1. The Iraqi Left Between Participation and Boycott in the 2025 Elections

This article comes at a critical political and organizational moment for the Iraqi left. Recent setbacks can no longer be explained by external factors alone. What we are experiencing is a real test of our will and our ability to invent new tools of action and new methodologies. The results achieved by most of the Iraqi left in the 2025 elections cannot be read as a passing electoral loss, nor merely as a direct outcome of an unfair electoral law and the dominance of political money. These external factors are undoubtedly real and influential, and they are compounded by even harsher challenges, namely the systematic restrictions and repression exercised by hegemonic forces, and the impact of structural corruption that distorts the entire field of struggle, making competition profoundly unequal.

However, focusing on external influences alone, despite their importance, is not sufficient to grasp the full picture. What actually occurred was a concentrated expression of a deeper crisis affecting organizational forms, modes of work, and the prevailing style of discourse and thinking within the Iraqi left in general, across all its factions. This is not a crisis of specific parties or leaders, but one that touches a distorted relationship between a correct idea and flawed tools. It is the relationship between a radical transformative discourse and the way it is presented and marketed within a highly complex and brutal political market, governed by security and financial dominance rather than free democratic competition. Despite this clear decline, the Iraqi left in all its currents remains the real hope and the most serious alternative for social change. The justice of its project and its latent capacity for organization and collective action still exist, but they await new forms of action that correspond to social transformations, and that are capable not only of improving mass influence, but also of inventing scientific and methodological tools suited to the current conditions of political and social struggle in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region.

From this dual diagnosis, internal dysfunction and external challenge, the real question becomes not only why most left forces failed to achieve the desired results in elections or even in boycott, nor why they failed to strengthen their political and social presence in general. Rather, why, despite the dire conditions of the masses and the rule of