Iraq held a parliamentary election on 10 October 2021. This Thursday, more than a year later, parliament finally elected a new president.
Abdul Latif Rashid defeated incumbent President Barham Salih in a parliamentary vote and was sworn into office. He then nominated Mohammed Shia al-Sudani as prime minister-designate, giving Sudani the task of assembling a cabinet capable of receiving parliamentary approval. The development potentially ends one of the longest periods of government-formation deadlock since Iraq’s post-2003 political system was created.
After everything that has happened during those twelve months, the appointment almost feels anticlimactic. There was an election, months of coalition negotiations, judicial disputes, failed presidential votes, the resignation of Muqtada al-Sadr’s 73 MPs, occupations of parliament by Sadr’s supporters and eventually deadly fighting between rival armed groups in Baghdad. Now, after all of that, politicians have returned to parliament and begun constructing a government.
This makes Iraq a useful case for thinking about something that democratic politics often treats too simplistically: compromise.
Political leaders routinely praise compromise as though reaching an agreement is inherently evidence of responsible government. Sometimes it is. If several groups possess legitimate but incompatible preferences, no democratic system can function unless at least some of them accept outcomes they would not have chosen independently.
But compromise can also preserve dysfunctional institutions.
If political elites spend a year paralysing government, divide ministries among themselves and finally reach an agreement once each faction receives enough access to power, the fact that they eventually compromised does not necessarily mean the political system worked well.
It may mean the political system survived its own dysfunction.
That distinction matters enormously in Iraq.
The country’s post-2003 political order was designed partly around preventing the return of authoritarian domination by one political group. Iraq contains Shiite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, Kurds and numerous smaller ethnic and religious communities, all shaped by histories of repression, conflict and distrust. The informal political arrangement that developed after Saddam Hussein therefore distributes major state offices among communities: the prime minister is conventionally Shiite, the parliamentary speaker Sunni and the president Kurdish.
This system has a defensible purpose. It reassures major communities that losing an election will not mean exclusion from the state.
The problem is that protection against exclusion can gradually become entitlement to division.
Political offices begin to be treated not simply as public institutions but as assets allocated among parties and communities. Ministries become part of coalition bargaining. Political organisations acquire influence over public employment and contracts. Government formation becomes an extended negotiation over who controls which parts of the state.
The institution designed to prevent one group capturing everything can therefore encourage several groups to capture pieces.
That is a very different form of state weakness from dictatorship.
In a dictatorship, power is excessively concentrated.
In a patronage-based power-sharing system, power can become excessively fragmented.
Both can weaken accountability.
If one ruler controls everything, nobody can constrain the ruler. If ten parties control different parts of the state, nobody can easily determine who is responsible when the state fails.
Iraq increasingly suffers from the second problem.
Consider electricity. Iraq possesses some of the world’s largest oil reserves and earns enormous revenues from petroleum exports, yet citizens continue experiencing unreliable electricity and inadequate public services. When services fail, responsibility becomes dispersed across ministries, parties, provincial governments and political networks.
Every institution can blame another.
Fragmented authority therefore creates accountability dilution.
Voters know government performs badly but may struggle to identify which political actor should bear the cost.
Political parties can then preserve support through communal identity, patronage or local networks even while national institutions remain ineffective.
This is one reason elections alone cannot guarantee accountable government.
Citizens need not only the ability to remove politicians but the ability to know whom to remove for which failure.
Clear responsibility matters.
Britain’s parliamentary system normally makes this comparatively straightforward. If one party possesses a majority and governs badly, voters know which party controlled government.
Coalition systems trade some of that clarity for broader representation.
Iraq pushes the trade-off much further because coalition bargaining intersects with communal power-sharing and informal patronage networks.
The result can be representation without sufficiently clear responsibility.
This helps explain the extraordinary government-formation delay.
Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement won the largest number of seats in last year’s election, but 73 seats in a 329-member parliament did not give him anything close to unilateral control. Sadr attempted to construct a majority with Kurdish and Sunni allies while excluding rival Shiite factions associated with the Coordination Framework.
His opponents possessed enough institutional leverage to prevent that strategy from succeeding.
Sadr eventually ordered his MPs to resign in June, apparently hoping that extra-parliamentary political pressure could accomplish what parliamentary arithmetic had not.
Instead, the resignations strengthened his opponents inside parliament.
By late August, the conflict moved onto the streets. Rival groups confronted one another in Baghdad, and dozens of people were killed before Sadr instructed supporters to withdraw.
That episode should change how we interpret this week’s compromise.
The political elite did not negotiate in an environment where parliament was the only source of power.
Several Iraqi political movements possess relationships with armed groups.
That means coalition negotiations occur under the shadow of coercive capacity outside the state.
This is one of the largest unresolved problems in Iraqi democracy.
A democratic state should eventually monopolise legitimate organised violence.
Political parties can possess supporters.
They should not possess parallel military capabilities capable of altering bargaining power.
Otherwise the meaning of parliamentary representation changes.
A party with forty MPs and an armed militia possesses a different kind of influence from a party with forty MPs and no militia.
Votes stop being the only currency of political power.
That weakens the equality democracy is supposed to create.
This is also where Iranian influence becomes important. Several factions inside the Coordination Framework maintain close relationships with Tehran, while Sadr presents himself as an Iraqi nationalist resistant to excessive Iranian influence despite sharing Shiite religious politics with many of his rivals.
Reducing Iraq’s conflict to “Iran versus America” would be inaccurate. Iraqi political actors possess their own interests and frequently resist external pressure.
But geography and institutional weakness create opportunities for outside powers.
Iran can build relationships with parties and armed groups.
The United States retains diplomatic, military and economic influence.
Turkey possesses interests in northern Iraq.
Gulf states maintain their own relationships.
A fragmented political system therefore creates multiple entry points through which external actors can exercise influence.
This is a sovereignty problem created partly by domestic institutional weakness.
A strong state can bargain with foreign powers as one political actor.
A fragmented state may contain several domestic actors bargaining with foreign powers separately.
That reduces national strategic coherence.
Again, state capacity and sovereignty are connected.
Iraq can possess internationally recognised borders and formal independence while struggling to ensure that political decisions occur exclusively through national institutions.
This is why Sudani’s nomination matters beyond his individual political programme. The next government will need to demonstrate that government actually means something: budgets can be passed, public services can be improved, oil revenue can be converted into infrastructure and armed actors can gradually become subordinate to state authority.
Those objectives sound basic.
That is exactly the problem.
Iraq has extraordinary fiscal resources. High oil prices have generated enormous revenues this year. Reuters reported last month that Iraq had earned more than $82 billion in oil revenues in only eight months, yet political deadlock prevented a normal national budget and delayed major infrastructure and climate projects.
This is almost a controlled demonstration of why money is not state capacity.
The government can have billions of dollars available and still fail to convert them into outcomes because institutions cannot agree on how the money should be allocated.
Economists sometimes focus on resource constraints because scarcity is fundamental. Iraq demonstrates the opposite problem: abundance can coexist with institutional incapacity.
A country can have enough money and still lack enough government.
This is the political economy of the resource curse.
Oil revenue reduces the immediate need for the state to build a broad tax relationship with citizens. Political actors then compete intensely over control of resource rents. Public-sector jobs and contracts become mechanisms for distributing those rents through political networks.
The state becomes economically central while remaining institutionally weak.
That sounds contradictory, but it is common in rentier systems.
A large government is not necessarily a strong government.
Size measures how much money flows through the state.
Capacity measures whether institutions can implement decisions impersonally and effectively.
Iraq needs more of the second, not simply more of the first.
This is where Sudani’s government, if successfully formed, will confront the difference between elite compromise and institutional reform.
Political factions have apparently reached enough of an agreement to nominate a prime minister.
But what exactly have they agreed to?
If the agreement simply divides ministries and resources in a way that satisfies major political blocs, it may restore short-term stability while preserving the incentives that produced the year-long crisis.
That is equilibrium without reform.
Everyone receives enough that nobody wants to destroy the arrangement.
Citizens continue receiving inadequate government.
Political systems can remain stable in that condition for surprisingly long periods.
This is why stability should never be treated automatically as evidence of institutional health.
An equilibrium can be stable because it serves the people.
It can also be stable because it serves the actors powerful enough to change it.
The distinction depends on who benefits.
Iraq’s young population has repeatedly demonstrated frustration with the existing political system, particularly over corruption, unemployment and public services. The large Tishreen protest movement beginning in 2019 challenged the entire sectarian patronage structure rather than merely one government.
Those protests matter because they suggest political identity in Iraq may be changing faster than the institutions designed after 2003.
Younger Iraqis did not experience Saddam Hussein’s rule in the same way as older generations. They may care less about the communal fears that originally justified rigid power-sharing and more about whether government produces employment, electricity and accountable institutions.
If so, Iraq faces the same problem Northern Ireland faces in a very different context: institutions created to manage historical identity divisions may eventually preserve those divisions after citizens begin wanting politics organised around something else.
This does not mean communal identity has disappeared in Iraq.
It plainly has not.
The danger lies in assuming identities remain politically fixed simply because institutions treat them as fixed.
Institutions create incentives.
If every important office is allocated through communal categories, ambitious politicians have reasons to organise through communal categories.
Changing political behaviour may therefore require changing institutional rewards.
But constitutional reform is extraordinarily difficult because the groups benefiting from the existing arrangements possess the power required to reform them.
This is another collective-action problem.
Almost everyone may agree abstractly that corruption should fall and institutions should become more meritocratic.
Specific reforms create specific losers.
A party controlling a ministry may support meritocracy generally while opposing the particular reform that removes its influence over appointments.
A politician can support reducing patronage while protecting jobs distributed through their own network.
Universal principles become difficult when costs become particular.
That is why institutional reform often requires moments of crisis.
Crises weaken old arrangements enough that change becomes possible.
Iraq has certainly experienced the crisis.
Whether political elites use it for reform is another question.
There is also a danger in expecting too much from Sudani personally. Political commentary often searches for the right leader who can finally solve institutional problems.
But if Iraq’s difficulties are structural, changing prime ministers cannot be enough.
A capable prime minister still operates through parliament, ministries, parties, provincial governments and security organisations.
Leadership matters.
Institutions determine how much leadership can accomplish.
This is a lesson that has appeared repeatedly throughout these posts. Sri Lanka could not solve a balance-of-payments crisis simply by replacing Rajapaksa. Britain cannot generate growth simply because Truss announces a new economic philosophy. Iraq cannot produce state capacity simply by nominating a new prime minister.
Personnel changes matter most when they alter the incentives of institutions underneath them.
The presidency itself demonstrates how Iraq’s system transforms symbolic offices into bargaining points. The Iraqi president possesses much less executive authority than the prime minister, yet electing one became a major obstacle because the presidency is tied into broader negotiations among Kurdish parties and national blocs.
That is a sign that the office’s importance lies partly in what it represents within the distribution of political power rather than simply the formal powers written into the constitution.
Again, institutions acquire meaning through political context.
The same presidency can be ceremonial legally and pivotal politically.
Rashid’s election therefore resolves one veto point and allows the next stage of government formation to begin.
That is progress.
We should recognise it without exaggerating it.
A year-long deadlock ending through parliamentary negotiation is better than the deadlock ending through military victory by one faction. Iraq’s political actors have returned from armed confrontation to institutional bargaining.
That matters enormously.
The political system bent very far without completely breaking.
But resilience should not become an excuse for accepting dysfunction indefinitely.
A bridge that survives repeated earthquakes deserves credit.
If it requires a year to cross, it still needs redesigning.
Iraq’s democracy has now demonstrated that it can hold elections and survive an extraordinarily difficult government-formation crisis.
The next stage is proving that elections can produce something citizens experience as government.
Pass a budget.
Provide electricity.
Create employment.
Invest oil revenues productively.
Reduce corruption.
Strengthen institutions that belong to the state rather than political factions.
These objectives are less dramatic than storming parliament or electing a president after a year-long deadlock.
They are how political legitimacy is actually rebuilt.
In July, I wrote that Iraq’s problem was not that citizens could not vote. It was that voting had become insufficiently connected to governing.
This week, the missing connection has finally begun to form.
Votes produced a parliament.
The parliament has now produced a president.
The president has nominated a prime minister.
The next steps are harder.
A prime minister has to produce a government.
The government has to produce policy.
Policy has to produce outcomes.
Only then will Iraq’s citizens be able to decide whether the year they spent waiting was compromise doing its democratic work, or simply another demonstration of how efficiently the political class can eventually agree when the thing being divided is the state itself.
