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Iraq parliament fails to elect new president over lack of quorum
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BAGHDAD, 27 March 2022, (TON): Iraq’s parliament failed again on Saturday to vote for a president after Iran-backed groups boycotted the session, in a setback to an alliance led by cleric Moqtada al-Sadr which won the election and threatened to remove them from politics.
Sadr had hoped parliament would elect Rebar Ahmed, a veteran Kurdish intelligence official and current interior minister of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region.
But only 202 members of parliament out of 329 were present, which is less than the necessary two-thirds quorum needed to choose a new president for the mostly ceremonial post, while 126 lawmakers boycotted the session.
Farhad Alaaldin, chairman of the Iraq Advisory Council, a policy research institute said “it is a storm in a cup. Today is a good proof that the party that had claimed that it has the majority had failed to achieve it. It is a bad situation getting worse.”
A win for Sadr’s allies would threaten to exclude Tehran’s allies from power for the first time in years.
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