Where is Iraq heading to? The importance of rewriting the constitution and changing the type of the governance system in Iraq

The chaos and ridiculousness practised by the current political class in Iraq do not stop at any limit; rather they have extended to negatively affect all the pillars and concepts of what a democratic system should be. The ruling political parties handle democracy, including the elections, heavily based on their narrow interests. They consider the elections fair and express the will of the people if they win the desired number of parliamentary seats, but if they don’t, then they characterize the elections as fraudulent, and its results were tampered with to benefit foreign interests.

It is only in Iraq that one can hear theories and calls that want to circumvent election results in the name of “the standards of the political weight” of each party. As such, the ruling political parties argue that government forming should not be based only on election results but also considering the “political weight” of the participating parties in the elections. This means the ruling political parties want to continue imposing the notorious political quota system in Iraq which has led to the collapse of the state institutions and caused the spread of corruption. Consequently, the leaders of the ruling political parties in Iraq believe that their charisma and their symbolic?significance are more important than the will of the people and the results of the elections.

Democracy in Iraq became corrupted by the growth of the oligarchical power of the ruling parties; it became ineffective and cannot provide any solution for the current crisis of the political system in Iraq. Therefore, the current political deadlock in Iraq cannot be solved by only dissolving the parliament and going into early elections, because the root of this crisis is a set of personal quarrels, differences, and disappearance of trust between the political leaders. Consequently, the main reason that ignited this crisis is the Shiite Islamic parties in Iraq, who have enjoyed since 2005 the political quota system and the principle of sectarian and ethnic consensus, which has been a source of ineffectual governance. However, after the 2021 elections, the Shiite Islamic parties moved into a new stage of the political struggle owing?to?post-electoral?contestation. The post-electoral period has led to serious internal political tension and intense polarization, settling accounts with opponents and eliminating political rivals from the same sect and ethnic group.

Al-Sadr’s choice to use mass protests and to mobilize his followers to demonstrate will not achieve any practical results. The protests in Iraq start out strong and then lose their lustre when there are no defined main goals and steps towards escalation, and it eventually becomes routine work that slowly weakens with time. On the other hand, the ruling political parties in Iraq do not want to come up with solutions to the political crisis and to the state's inability, instead, they try to cover up their failures with repetitive initiatives calling on the political parties for dialogue. However, those dialogues cannot offer a real solution as they take place between political parties whose existence is already the problem itself.

Early elections do not have the magical powers to solve the failure of the political system in Iraq or the poor reputation of democracy either. The only thing that early elections can offer is that it will extend the life of the current ruling political class in Iraq, a class that has grown old and is unable to respond to the demand of the Iraqi people for a real and comprehensive political, economic, and social reforms in which human rights, dignified living standards, social justice, order, and security have top priority.

What is required is to rewrite the Iraqi constitution, as it is the root of all problems that Iraq has been suffering from since 2005; it hampered Iraqis in building a country of citizenship and institutions and helped in building an ethno-sectarian political system in the country. It enabled the current political elites to maintain a strong grip on the political process, and ultimately accelerated the intra-group struggle and competition for power and plundering of the wealth of the country.

Rewriting the Iraqi constitution must lead to another reform in the governance system in Iraq and push for forming a semi-presidential system in Iraq. A system that allows citizens to directly vote for their President, who will set the government, while the parliament adopts laws and is responsible for oversight of the President and Government action.?