Salam Pax ponders the Iraqi elections:
The biggest winner: Al-Maliki. If there was even a night in which our PM should have gone out and gotten seriously drunk it was the night the preliminary results were announced. In 10 out of 14 provinces his bloc came out on top and in two of Iraq’s biggest provinces, Baghdad and Basra, his bloc will get the majority of seats on the councils. (Al Maliki doesn’t drink, so I got drunk for him, any excuse for a binge eh!).
My worry is that this is a man who until recently was accused of sectarianism and heavy handed politics. It wasn’t until the SOFA negotiations that he read the shift in the national mood and went for the whole non-sectarian national politics, even moving away from the idea of regional governments back to a unified Iraq with a central government. So let’s hope he actually has changed and it wasn’t just a bit of political opportunism… actually now that I’ve written that it sounds too naïve.. It probably is. Ho hum, we’ll see.
The Dish 