EBRIL, Kurdistan Region - The Kurdistan Region’s ruling parties will secure over 60 seats in the upcoming regional parliament, Rudaw projects, with the number of votes required to earn a seat lowest in Halabja and highest in Duhok.
Out of the 100 seats in the upcoming parliament, the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) is expected to secure 39, the highest number of seats, followed by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), with 23 seats.
The ruling parties had a combined 66 seats In the 2018 parliament, in which the KDP had 45 seats and the PUK 21.
The legislature was downsized to 100 seats from 111 after a landmark Iraqi court ruling stripped the 11 seats reserved for ethnic and religious minorities. The court later reinstated a quota of five seats within the 100.
The New Generation Movement (NGM), the Kurdistan Region’s most vocal opposition force comes third with 15 seats. Formed by businessman Shaswar Abdulwahid to contest the 2018 regional elections, NGM has almost doubled its seats. The party won eight seats in the previous Kurdistan parliament term.
The Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), the leading party in the Islamist camp is expected to secure seven seats and the second prominent Islamist party, the Kurdistan Justice Group (known as Komal), has gained three seats.
The newly-established National Stance (Halwest), led by Ali Hama Saleh, the popular and outspoken former leader of the Change Movement (Gorran) in the parliament comes fifth with four seats. Saleh’s former party Gorran is projected to win one seat only.
Once a major opposition force with 12 seats in the previous parliament term, Gorran lost popularity and fell into obscurity following several unpopular decisions, including alliances with the two ruling parties that alienated its base.
The People’s Front (Baray Gal), a splinter faction from the PUK, is expected to have two seats in the upcoming parliament.
Led by former PUK co-chair Lahur Talabany, Baray Gal was founded in January after Talabany gave up on his repeated futile legal attempts to regain his position as PUK co-chair.
The Kurdistan Region Alliance (KRA), led by veteran Peshmerga Mohammed Haji Mahmoud, consists of the Kurdistan Social Democratic Party (KSDP), the Kurdistan Communist Party, and the Kurdistan Toilers’ Party. It fielded 84 candidates across all four provinces and is expected to secure one seat.
Rudaw’s projection is calculated based on the total number of valid votes in each constituency, with the highest value of votes per seat in Duhok at 22,448 votes for a seat, Erbil at 20,309 per seat, Sulaimani, at 16,978 votes, and the lowest in Halabja at 12,978 per seat.
The Kurdistan Region held parliamentary elections on Sunday, with a total of 1,191 candidates contesting for seats in the legislature. The polls had a 72 percent voter turnout, and over two million people across the Region cast their vote, according to preliminary results released by Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC).
On Monday, IHEC announced the number of votes won by each party with 99.63 percent of the ballots counted.
The KDP amassed 809,197 votes, nearly double the votes of the PUK 408,141. The NGM rose to become the third-largest party in the Region with 290,991 votes. KIU won 116,981 votes, Komal 64,710. Halwest secured 55,775 and Baray Gal, 33,365, Gorran won 11,621 votes and the Kurdistan Region Alliance gained 13,199 votes across the region.
