2021 Iraqi parliamentary election
Based on Wikipedia: 2021 Iraqi parliamentary election
An Election Born from Protest
In October 2021, Iraq held what should have been a routine parliamentary election. Instead, it became a flashpoint that nearly tore the country apart, triggering eleven months of political paralysis and armed standoffs in the streets of Baghdad.
The story of how Iraq got to this moment begins two years earlier, in October 2019, when something remarkable happened. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis—mostly young people who had grown up knowing nothing but war, occupation, and sectarian violence—poured into the streets demanding an end to the political system that had governed their country since the American invasion of 2003.
They weren't protesting for one sect against another. They weren't carrying the banners of political parties. They were simply fed up.
The System They Wanted to Overthrow
To understand why so many Iraqis risked their lives in those protests, you need to understand the peculiar political arrangement that emerged after Saddam Hussein's fall. Iraq adopted a system called muhasasa—essentially a power-sharing arrangement where government positions are divvied up among different ethnic and religious groups. In theory, this ensures everyone gets a seat at the table. In practice, it created a system where loyalty to your sect or party mattered more than competence, and where patronage networks distributed jobs and contracts to the faithful while everyone else struggled.
By 2019, youth unemployment had reached crisis levels. Electricity still flickered out during the brutal summer months, nearly two decades after the invasion. Water was often undrinkable. And yet the political class—ensconced in the fortified Green Zone—seemed utterly indifferent to these daily humiliations.
The protesters had a slogan: "We want a homeland." It captured perfectly what they felt they had lost.
A Concession Under Pressure
The government's initial response was brutal. Security forces and militia groups killed hundreds of protesters. But the movement refused to die, and eventually, Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi resigned. His successor, Mustafa al-Kadhimi, promised early elections as a concession to the street.
Originally scheduled for 2022, the elections were moved up to June 2021. Then they slipped again to October, as the Independent High Electoral Commission—the body responsible for running Iraq's elections—requested more time to organize what they promised would be "free and fair" voting.
More significantly, the electoral rules themselves were overhauled. Iraq had previously used proportional representation, a system where voters choose parties rather than individual candidates, and seats are distributed according to each party's share of the vote. The new system switched to something called single non-transferable vote, conducted in smaller constituencies.
Why does this technical change matter? Under proportional representation, established parties with national name recognition and deep pockets tend to dominate. Smaller constituencies with individual candidates theoretically give local independents—including figures who emerged from the protest movement—a better chance of winning.
At least, that was the hope.
The Mathematics of Representation
Iraq's parliament, the Council of Representatives, has 329 seats. Of these, 320 were elected from 83 different constituencies across the country, with each constituency sending between three and five representatives to Baghdad. The remaining nine seats were reserved for Iraq's religious and ethnic minorities: five for Christians, and one each for Yazidis, Shabaks, Mandaeans, and Feyli Kurds.
There was another twist built into the system. In each constituency, one seat was automatically reserved for the woman who received the most votes. This quota system was designed to ensure women's representation in a parliament that might otherwise be overwhelmingly male.
The Council of Representatives isn't just a legislative body. Its members choose Iraq's president, who in turn appoints the prime minister. Getting enough seats to control this process—or to block your rivals from doing so—is the ultimate prize in Iraqi politics.
The Boycott That Wasn't
In July 2021, Muqtada al-Sadr made an announcement that sent shockwaves through Iraq's political establishment. His movement—the Sadrist Movement, arguably the most powerful political force in the country—would boycott the upcoming election.
Who is Muqtada al-Sadr? He defies easy categorization. The son of a revered Shia cleric assassinated by Saddam's regime, he rose to prominence leading an armed uprising against American forces in 2004. He commands the loyalty of millions of poor Shia Iraqis, particularly in the sprawling slums of Sadr City in eastern Baghdad. He has positioned himself as a nationalist, critical of both American and Iranian influence in Iraq. His followers are fervent, sometimes fanatically so.
Al-Sadr cited corruption and the impossibility of fair elections as his reasons for boycotting. The Iraqi Communist Party—which had allied with the Sadrists in the previous election under the banner "Alliance Towards Reforms"—announced they too would stay home. Even Louis Raphaël I Sako, the Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church and the spiritual leader of Iraq's dwindling Christian community, called on his flock not to participate.
The United Nations mission in Iraq condemned the boycotts. Former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who leads the State of Law Coalition and harbors his own ambitions of returning to power, criticized the decision. The Kurdistan Democratic Party, which dominates the Kurdish autonomous region in the north, also pushed back.
Then, on August 27th, al-Sadr abruptly reversed himself. His movement would compete after all.
Election Day and Its Discontents
Soldiers, prisoners, and internally displaced people—Iraq has millions who have been uprooted by years of war—voted early on October 8th. The general population went to the polls on October 10th.
The turnout numbers tell their own story. The Independent High Electoral Commission initially reported that 42.15% of eligible voters participated. This figure was later revised downward to 41.05%—roughly 9 million voters out of 22 million eligible. In a country where elections were once held at gunpoint under Saddam and participation was mandatory, fewer than half of Iraqis now bothered to show up.
The apathy was its own form of protest. Many Iraqis had concluded that no matter who won, nothing would change.
A Surprising Result
When preliminary results emerged on October 11th, Iraq's political establishment was stunned. The Sadrist Movement—the same group that had threatened to boycott just months earlier—swept the election with 73 seats, making it by far the largest bloc in parliament.
The real shock was what happened to the Fatah Alliance. This coalition represented Iraq's pro-Iranian political forces, built around powerful militias like the Badr Organization and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq (often translated as "League of the Righteous"). These groups had emerged as major players after fighting the Islamic State, and many expected them to dominate the election. Instead, they crashed from 48 seats in the previous parliament to just 17.
How did this happen? The new electoral system may have played a role, fragmenting votes in ways that hurt parties accustomed to the old proportional rules. But the simpler explanation is that many Iraqis were tired of militia power and Iranian influence—and they showed it at the ballot box.
Crying Foul
Hadi al-Amiri and Qais al-Khazali, the respective leaders of the Badr Organization and Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq, were not about to accept defeat gracefully. They immediately cried fraud and demanded the results be annulled.
The Independent High Electoral Commission responded by ordering recounts. Of the nearly 58,000 polling stations across Iraq, about 46,000 had successfully uploaded electronic results. Another 8,500 were selected by lottery for manual recounting, while roughly 3,700 more required manual counting because of technical problems.
By October 18th, the commission had received over 1,000 formal complaints. The losing parties were determined to overturn the results through legal challenges if possible, and the threat of violence hung in the air if the courts didn't cooperate.
Final Results and Court Battles
On November 30th, the Independent High Electoral Commission released official final results. The Sadrist bloc's dominance was confirmed: 73 seats, more than double any other party. The Progress Party, a new Sunni formation, came second with 37 seats. Al-Maliki's State of Law Coalition won 34. The Kurdistan Democratic Party secured 32 seats from the Kurdish region. The Fatah Alliance remained humiliated at 17.
Notably, 40 seats went to independents—a reminder that at least some of the protest movement's energy had translated into actual parliamentary representation.
Among the minority seats, the Babylon Movement—a Christian party—won four of the five seats reserved for that community. The single Yazidi seat went to the Yazidi Movement for Reform and Progress.
The legal challenges continued for weeks. On December 27th, Iraq's Supreme Court finally ratified the results, rejecting the complaints filed by al-Amiri and al-Khazali. The election outcome would stand.
What Came After
Ratifying the results did not end Iraq's political crisis—it deepened it. Forming a government requires building a coalition that can command a majority in parliament, and Iraqi politics makes this a torturous process.
Muqtada al-Sadr, emboldened by his victory, tried to form a "national majority government" that would have excluded the pro-Iranian parties entirely. They, understandably, refused to be sidelined. Months of deadlock followed. Negotiations collapsed. Al-Sadr ordered his lawmakers to resign en masse from parliament. Then his supporters stormed the parliament building itself. For a time, Iraq seemed on the brink of civil war.
The crisis dragged on for eleven months before finally resolving in October 2022—a full year after the election—when a new government was finally formed under Prime Minister Mohammed Shia' al-Sudani. By that point, the optimism that had briefly flickered after the election had long since died.
The View from Outside
The United Nations Security Council issued a statement congratulating Iraq on conducting what it called a "technically sound election" while deploring threats of violence against electoral officials and the process itself. Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the UN's Special Representative for Iraq, said the vote was "generally peaceful and well-run" and that "there is much for Iraqis to be proud of in this election."
She was not wrong about the technical execution. By the standards of the region, Iraq's electoral machinery functioned reasonably well. The electronic voting systems largely worked. International observers were present. The Independent High Electoral Commission processed thousands of complaints through formal legal channels.
But technical competence could not paper over Iraq's deeper dysfunction. An election is supposed to produce a legitimate government that can actually govern. What Iraq got instead was a year of paralysis, armed standoffs in the streets, and a resolution that left almost no one satisfied.
The Iraqi Left at the Crossroads
For Iraq's left—represented in this election primarily by the Iraqi Communist Party—the 2021 vote posed an impossible dilemma. The party had allied with al-Sadr in 2018, hoping to ride his populist energy toward reform. But by 2021, they concluded that the entire system was too corrupt to participate in.
"In the absence of conditions for free and fair elections," the party declared, "participation in them would only mean collusion in reproducing the same corrupt political system that is responsible for the catastrophic state of affairs in the country."
This is a stance with a long history on the left: the debate between working within a broken system to change it incrementally, versus refusing to legitimize that system through participation. It is a dilemma without a clean answer.
The 2019 protests that forced these early elections were themselves a grassroots uprising without clear ideological leadership. Young Iraqis in the streets were not marching under communist banners—they were marching against the entire political class, left and right, religious and secular. Some of that energy did translate into independent candidates winning seats. But the major winners were still the established forces: the Sadrists, the Kurdish parties, the remnants of Maliki's machine.
For the Iraqi left, the question remains: how do you build a political alternative in a system designed to perpetuate itself? The 2021 election provided no answer. Neither, one suspects, will the next one.
A Country Still Searching
Nearly two decades after the American invasion, Iraq remains trapped in a political system that satisfies almost no one. Elections happen. Governments form, eventually. But the fundamental problems—corruption, sectarianism, militia power, foreign interference, the absence of basic services—persist.
The 2021 election was supposed to be different. It came in response to genuine popular uprising. The rules were changed. New faces competed. And for a moment, when the Sadrist surge was confirmed and the pro-Iranian militias were humiliated, it seemed like the voters had actually spoken.
Then came eleven months of deadlock, armed protesters in the Green Zone, and a compromise that looked very much like the old system reasserting itself.
The protesters of 2019 wanted a homeland. They are still searching.