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RELIGIOUS PARTIES DOMINATE EARLY COUNT
Preliminary results indicate most ballots were cast along sectarian and ethnic lines
Baghdad -- The major Shiite Islamist coalition won a commanding share of seats in Iraq's new parliament, and Iraqis apparently voted overwhelmingly along religious and ethnic lines, according to partial results released Monday.
The preliminary results from Thursday's nationwide ballot offered an indication of the shape of Iraq's first democratically elected parliament under a new Constitution adopted following Saddam Hussein's ouster.
The initial results suggest that a government that was heavily secular and nationalist under Hussein will become far more religious and sectarian in character, with Shiite and Sunni Muslim parties dominant, raising the chances of sectarian tension for years to come, say some Iraqi politicians.
"Unfortunately, there is a sectarian division among the population," said Omar Farouk al-Damluji, a former minister and a secular leader.
Damluji said he was resigned to a political landscape driven entirely by sect and ethnic groups. "Now this is the psychology of the people," he said. "Each group wants to show its weight."
In preliminary results covering about 160 seats in 11 provinces -- only one of which has a Sunni Arab majorities -- the three major sectarian political groups won the greatest numbers. The Shiites took 87 seats, the Kurds won 32 seats, and the new Sunni Arab coalition held 16 seats in the races counted so far. The new parliament will have 275 members.
The legislature will thus be dominated by sectarian parties, including the Sunnis, who had boycotted the previous transitional assembly.
The initial results showed former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi's secular party finishing a distant third in Baghdad province behind the Shiite coalition and the Sunni alliance. Allawi won fewer seats than he did in January in the cosmopolitan capital, where secular candidates had hoped to do well.
Allawi, with the quiet support of many U.S. officials in Iraq, had hoped to win over votes from Shiites disappointed with the performance of the current government, which is dominated by Islamist religious parties.
Instead, the preliminary results fell in line with the predictions of the three major sectarian parties, who had said they expected the Shiites to control about half the seats in the next 275-seat parliament, with the Kurdish and Sunni Arab alliances each winning about 20 percent of the seats.
If the final results mirror the preliminary tally, it will mark a major defeat for secular politicians in Iraq and will also make official the return of Sunni Arabs as a formidable political bloc in the new government.
Poor performances by Allawi and other centrists bode ill for Iraq, said Wayne White, a former State Department intelligence official who is now an analyst at the Middle East Institute, a Washington think-tank.
"The thing that I really fear is that we're going to have a government of extremes and the center doesn't seem to be taking shape," he said.
The interim government was almost completely dominated by the Shiite Islamists and Kurds, with Allawi's coalition in opposition and holding about 15 percent of the seats.
Based on the early tally, the Shiite alliance, formally called the United Iraqi Alliance, appears poised to win about 130 seats, which would put it in a position to form a government with just one coalition partner. The alliance currently governs in alliance with Kurds.
Shiite leaders have said they hope to form a national unity government, led by a Shiite prime minister.
The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq said it would probably take about two weeks to investigate charges of voter fraud before certifying results.
