Low turnout at Iraq polls is signal to ‘corrupt politicians’
IRAQ saw a record low turnout at the polls yesterday as voters shunned early parliamentary elections intended to assuage anti-corruption protesters.
Early figures showed turnout hovering at around 19 per cent, in a clear victory for campaigners who called for a boycott of the poll in protest at the status quo. Turnout at the last election was 44 per cent.
Opinion polls before the vote suggested the main Shia Muslim factions would take the most seats, with the movement led by the powerful cleric Muqtada al-sadr expected to emerge as parliament’s biggest single faction.
Full results are expected to be announced this evening
Yesterday’s vote was the sixth time Iraq has gone to the polls since the 2003 US invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, and the first since massive youthled protests erupted in 2019.
Some 600 people were killed by security forces in an attempt to crush those protests, and many in the movement called for a boycott of the election.
“I lost my 17-year-old son Hussain after he got killed by a tear-gas canister fired by police during Baghdad protests,” said Abdul Ameer Hassan al-saadi, a high-school teacher.
“I will not vote for killers and corrupt politicians because the wound inside me and his mother we suffered after losing our boy is still bleeding.”
In a concession to the protest movement, the election was called six months early and held under a new electoral
‘I will not vote for [killers] because the wound inside me after losing our boy is still bleeding’
law designed to weaken the grip of the entrenched elite and open up space for independent candidates.
More than 600 international observers were in place across the country and new biometric fingerprint scanning voting cards were brought in.
Viola von Cramon, the head of the European Union’s election observer mission, said of the low turnout: “This is a clear political signal and one can only hope that it will be heard by the politicians and by the political elite of Iraq.”