Secular challenger’s bloc wins most seats in Iraqi elections

Secular challenger’s bloc wins most seats in Iraq

BAGHDAD — A secular challenger’s bloc edged out the prime minister’s in parliamentary elections, according to full vote returns Friday — a significant setback for Nouri al-Maliki, who has been the U.S. partner in Iraq for the past four years.

Al-Maliki vowed to challenge the results, which gave his bloc 89 seats to Ayad Allawi’s 91 in Iraq’s 325-seat parliament. Allawi is a secular Shiite politician and former prime minister who appealed across sectarian lines to minority Sunnis, who have been out of power since the downfall of Saddam Hussein.

The victory will enable Allawi to try to form a coalition government with rival parties. But the narrow margin sets the stage for months of political wrangling. The next prime minister will lead a government that presumably will be in power when the U.S. completes its scheduled troop withdrawal from Iraq next year.

Regardless of who eventually comes out on top, the results of the March 7 elections suggest that millions of Iraqis are fed up with a political system that revolves around membership in one of the two major Islamic sects.

They also show that Iraqis — both Shiite and Sunni — are suspicious of Iranian influence. Allawi was widely seen as closer to the region’s Arab governments than to Iran.

Al-Maliki, flanked by supporters, announced on national television that he would not accept the results. He said he would challenge the vote count through what he described as legal process. By law, he would have until Monday to challenge the results with the election commission.

Al-Maliki and his supporters in his State of Law coalition had previously called for a recount, saying there had been instances of vote rigging and fraud. But election officials had refused, and international observers have said the election was fair and credible.

Earlier Friday, the top U.N. official in Iraq, Ad Melkert, called on all sides to accept the results. That sentiment was echoed by U.S. Ambassador Christopher R. Hill and Gen. Ray Odierno, the top U.S. military official in Iraq, who praised what they described as a “historic electoral process,” and said they support the finding of election observers who found no evidence of widespread or serious fraud.

The results were based on numbers released by the election commission and compiled by The Associated Press. The commission released the seat allocation by province but did not include an overall number of seats won.

Hours before the results were announced, two bombings near a restaurant in a city north of Baghdad killed at least 40 people — a harbinger of a spike in violence that many Iraqis fear could accompany lengthy negotiations on forming a coalition government.

An increase in attacks could complicate U.S. plans to reduce troop levels from 95,000 to 50,000 by the end of August. All U.S. forces are slated to leave Iraq by the end of 2011.

Al-Maliki campaigned with all the benefits of incumbency: easy air time on national TV, the ability to dole out favors to local officials in exchange for their support, and a record of helping stop some of the country’s violence.

The prime minister, known as a hardline Shiite during his first couple of years in power, has more recently transformed himself into a law-and-order nationalist who has occasionally reached out to minority Sunnis.

While trying to re-establish a strong central government — most notably by routing a Shiite militia that ruled parts of Baghdad and Iraq’s second-largest city, Basra — al-Maliki has also alienated many key constituencies by governing with a heavy hand. His support for a ban of hundreds of candidates with alleged ties to Saddam’s regime severely undercut any support he had from Sunnis, who felt the ban unfairly targeted their candidates.

Many Sunnis instead threw their weight behind Allawi, who built a broad coalition drawn from both Islamic sects.

As Iraq’s first post-Saddam prime minister from 2004 to 2005, Allawi was in office during the U.S. offensive against Sunni holdouts in the insurgent-held city of Fallajuh.

But he later used his anti-Iran rhetoric to appeal to Sunnis wary of Tehran’s influence with their Shiite-majority government.

Associated Press Writers Saad Abdul-Kadir, Muhieddin Rashad, Sinan Salaheddin and Adam Schreck contributed to this report.