Iraqi Kurdistan selects parliament speaker after two-year deadlock
The parliament in Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region elected a speaker on Wednesday, more than two years after elections were held, with the chamber still riven by party divisions.
Politics in the region of northern Iraq has for decades been gripped by a power struggle between two major parties and the families behind them, with the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Barzanis on one side, and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Talabanis on the other.
The former prevailed in the October 2024 elections, which were postponed four times over political disputes, winning 39 of the 100 seats available.
Since then, legislative work has been blocked by continuous feuding between the factions over the distribution of top jobs and the composition of the government.
On Wednesday, the Kurdistan parliament held its first session, attended by 52 lawmakers who selected Vala Fareed Ibrahim, the candidate of the KDP bloc, as speaker, an AFP correspondent reported.
The PUK bloc, which has 23 members of parliament, boycotted the session along with the New Generation bloc of 15 deputies and several smaller groupings.
At a press conference after the session, Ibrahim said her election "serves all segments of Kurdistan and is not against any side" and called on all parties to end their boycott and return to parliament.
Salar Mahmoud, an official with the PUK, told AFP that his party "believes in joint action and national consensus in order to correct the overall course of governance in Kurdistan... but it seems that the KDP has followed the same mistakes of the past".
The regional legislature is now due to elect a president for Kurdistan and a prime minister.
The region, which has enjoyed self-rule since 1991 and is close to the United States and European governments, has long presented itself to investors as an oasis of stability compared to the rest of Iraq.
But activists and opposition figures say it faces many of the same problems, foremost among them corruption, the repression of dissenting voices and clientelism from the ruling parties.
Source: Agence France Presse
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