Voting for Iraq’s Kurdistan parliament postponed to June

Erbil – Iraqi Kurds announced Sunday that polls to elect a new parliament in the autonomous region would be held in June, after they were postponed from February because of political bickering.

The elections have been delayed several times because of differences between the two main parties in northern Iraq, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), which have failed to agree on changes to constituency boundaries.

Regional president Nechirvan Barzani signed the order for the elections to be held on June 10, a presidency statement said Sunday.

In August, authorities announced polling would take place on February 25 after consultation with the parties, but the Iraqi Electoral Commission then asked for a postponement, awaiting a court ruling on the region’s electoral law.

On February 21, Iraq’s Supreme Court ruled that the Kurdistan region’s parliament should have 100 lawmakers instead of 111, and that elections should be overseen by the Iraqi Electoral Commission.

Polling had originally been due to be held in October 2022, but instead the outgoing regional parliament extended its mandate for another year and set November 18, 2023 for the new election.

However, that date fell foul of the Iraqi Electoral Commission which said it was too close to December 18, the date set for provincial elections in the rest of the country.

The Kurdish authorities had come under mounting pressure to set a new election date after the Supreme Court ruled in May that the outgoing parliament’s extension of its own mandate had been “unconstitutional”.

The KDP is the largest party in the outgoing parliament with 45 seats, and the PUK has 21.