Baghdad, October 17: Followers of Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr have gone to the polls to take part in a primary vote and choose candidates for January’s parliamentary elections.
The Sadr movement, allied with the Iraqi National Alliance bloc, is expected to run against Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law Coalition.
The primaries were held in 350 polling stations nationwide, except the autonomous region of Kurdistan and Sunni majority al-Anbar and Nineveh Provinces. Sadrist officials said more than one and a half million people cast their ballots for the party’s nearly 650 candidates.
Holding 30 seats in Iraq’s 275-member parliament, the Sadr movement has been the only group so far to hold primaries ahead of the January 16 elections.
“The aim of this exercise is to engender in people loyalty to parliament,” Hazim al-Araji, the Sadrist movement’s chief in Baghdad’s shrine neighborhood of Kadhimiyah.
Sadrist lawmaker Maha ad-Douri also called on other political parties to follow the Shia movement’s example and “let the Iraqi people choose their representatives.”
Sadr has welcomed the primary vote — the first such poll since the fall of former dictator Saddam Hussein in 2003 — as a step towards the political liberation of Iraq.
However, the movement has threatened to boycott the January election, should the Iraqi parliament approve a plan for a closed voting system for the parliamentary election.
The system, being considered at the legislative body, would only show the names of parties and not candidates on ballots.
—–Agencies