The Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the United Nations in Iraq, Hennis-Plasschaert, said today, Tuesday, that what will happen in the coming days regarding the election results will determine the fate of Iraq, calling for the formation of an inclusive government, while the Electoral Commission began today to recount the votes in 870 electoral centers based on judicial orders.

In a session of the UN Security Council held today and devoted to developments in Iraq, the UN representative urged the Iraqi authorities and parties to recognize the results of the early parliamentary elections that were held on the tenth of last October, saying that “what will happen in the coming days will determine the fate and future of Iraq, and we must formation of an inclusive government.

Blackshart added that the Iraqi elections "were painstakingly organized and well-managed thanks to the efforts of the Independent High Electoral Commission, and represent a step towards restoring Iraqis' confidence in their government."

Mrs. @JeanineHennis Briefing the UN Security Council on #Iraq: The assessment of the elections was that they were generally quiet, well-managed and showed clear technical and procedural improvement.

It represented, in general, a great achievement that the Iraqi authorities and parties would be happy to acknowledge publicly.

pic.twitter.com/vvrScZpJmS

— UNAMI (@UNIraq) November 23, 2021

US delegate

At the same session, the US delegate to the UN Security Council, Linda Thomas Greenfield, said that an Iraqi government must be formed without intimidation or violence, and called on all parties to respect the results of the parliamentary elections, and Greenfield warned that any attempts to influence the electoral process or threaten United Nations staff in Baghdad and the High Commission Independent elections "must receive full condemnation by the Security Council."

According to the preliminary results, the Sadrist bloc came in the lead with 73 seats out of 329 seats in the House of Representatives, while the Progress bloc led by dissolved Parliament Speaker Muhammad al-Halbousi won 38 seats, followed by the State of Law bloc led by former Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki with 34 seats.

The Al-Fateh Alliance (which includes armed factions involved in the Popular Mobilization) suffered a significant loss in the recent elections, as it won 16 seats out of a total of 329 seats in Parliament, compared to 48 seats in the 2018 elections.

Since the announcement of the preliminary results, Iraq has been experiencing political and security tensions, as a result of the rejection of the election results by armed Shiite factions, saying that they are fabricated, and demanding a manual recount of votes throughout Iraq, not only in the electoral centers that are the subject of appeals.


The Electoral Commission recently announced that it had completed the manual counting of votes in the polling stations, in which candidates and political forces submitted appeals regarding their validity, and then submitted their appeals and recommendations to the Judicial Commission for Elections for final settlement.

resort

The Electoral Commission had said yesterday, Monday, that it will start from today the recount of votes in 870 polling centers out of 55,000, based on the orders of the Electoral Judicial Authority, after the commission accepted 21 appeals against the voting process.

Imad Jamil, a member of the Commission's media team, explained that 15 of the accepted appeals were for procedural reasons, which resulted in the commission being obliged to re-count and manually sort the contested stations, and the rest of the 6 appeals were accepted for legal and technical reasons, which resulted in the cancellation of the results of some polling stations.

The commission added that the manual recount in the aforementioned centers (870) would change the preliminary results of the elections.

The commission had recounted the votes manually in a number of electoral centers based on the acceptance of 68 appeals against the results, but the process did not result in any significant change in the announced preliminary results.

Babylon protest

In a related context, dozens of people demonstrated in front of the Court of Appeal and the Electoral Commission in Babil Governorate (central Iraq), protesting against changing the election results after the commission canceled the results of two electoral stations (offices) on the pretext of closing them after the specified time, as this caused the loss of an independent candidate for the benefit of another from a large bloc. .

Protesters supporting the independent candidate, Amir Al-Maamouri, chanted slogans and chants rejecting the mechanism for dealing with the election results, accusing the commission of favoring large blocs that lost in the elections at the expense of independent candidates and small blocs.