Baghdad, March 27: Results released by Iraq’s election commission show a secular challenger has beaten the country’s Prime Minister in the parliamentary elections, positioning him to be the first to try to form a government.
The full election results show former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi winning 91 seats, edging out Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki as results were released on Friday for Iraq’s 325-seat Parliament.
The results mark a serious setback for Maliki but do not necessarily guarantee Allawi the Prime Minister’s post, only the right to try to form a coalition government.
The results were based on numbers released by the election commission and compiled by Associated Press. The commission released the seat allocation province-by-province and did not include an overall number of seats won by each coalition.
Maliki said in a news conference that he would challenge the results.
Just hours before the election results were announced, two blasts at a restaurant in a city north of the capital killed 47 people and wounded dozens, said police. At least 65 were wounded in the blasts in Khalis, 80 km from Baghdad.
Earlier results, based on 95 per cent of ballots counted, showed Maliki’s mainly Shiite bloc in a virtual tie with the alliance led by Allawi, a Shiite who has garnered heavy Sunni support.
As Allawi does not come close to a majority, he will need to cobble together a coalition among the various factions representing Iraq’s broad range of religious and ethnic groups.
Maliki, who is fighting for a second four-year term, has tried to distance himself from his sectarian roots and portray himself as a nationalist who helped return stability to Iraq after years of violence. But his support for a ban of hundreds of candidates with alleged ties to Saddam Hussein’s regime severely undercut any support he had from Sunnis, who felt the ban unfairly targeted their candidates.
Many Sunnis instead threw their weight behind Allawi, a secular Shiite who has built a broad coalition drawn from both Islamic sects. Allawi, who served as Prime Minister from 2004 to 2005, has used his anti-Iran rhetoric to appeal to Sunnis who are wary of Tehran’s influence with their Shiite-majority government.
The result could spark new fighting and complicate American efforts to speed up troop withdrawals in the coming months. It also has prompted calls for a manual recount of the tallies from the March 7 election amid claims of vote rigging and fraud.
However, many international observers as well as Iraqi non-governmental organisations that monitored the election have said the process has basically been free and fair.
—-Agencies