Iraq elects Abdul Latif Rashid to unblock political crisis

Veteran Kurdish politician Abdul Latif Rashid became Iraq's new president on Thursday. An election that brings a glimpse of light at the end of the tunnel after a full year of political deadlock and violence in the streets.
 
The parliamentary session for the presidential vote was disrupted by a grenade attack that left around 10 people injured, including three members of the security forces. The plenary session resulted in the election of Abdul Latif Rashid with 162 out of 329 votes in his favour. Rashid is being praised by the local media for two main reasons. The first is the consensus he has brought together Iraq's two main Kurdish parties, which govern the north of the country. Both the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (UPK) and the Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) supported his candidacy. The KDP withdrew its candidate at the last minute to finally vote in favour of Rashid.

Rashid, on the other hand, has been a seasoned Iraqi politician for years. The Kurdish politician was part of the opposition to Saddam Hussein since his youth. He studied civil engineering in the UK and once Hussein's government was overthrown, he began his stint as a member of various executives. From 2003 to 2010 he served as Minister of Water Resources before becoming a senior advisor to the Iraqi Presidency.
 
In the Iraqi parliament, the coalition known as the Coordination Framework holds the largest number of seats. The new president has reached out to this coalition and appointed its candidate, Mohamed Shia al-Sudani, as Prime Minister. Al Sudani, who served as human rights minister from 2010 to 2014 under the al-Maliki government, was also governor of Maysan province. According to the analysis of Hamza Haddad, an Iraqi political analyst, al-Sudani's appointment would also be in response to the fact that Rashid's election as president would bear al-Maliki's signature.

According to the daily Al-Arab, the Shia close to Iran is said to have managed to convince the Kurdish Democratic Party to withdraw its candidate and support Rashid instead.  The post of Prime Minister finally escaped the cleric Muqtada al Sadr after months of struggle. Al Sadr is thus left out of the equation in Iraq's new government because of his "impatience", as some local media outlets such as Al-Arab assess.
 
With this configuration, Rashid and al-Sudani face the challenge of successfully forming a government in the next 30 days, as stipulated by the Iraqi constitution. Since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has operated under a system of power-sharing similar to Lebanon's, whereby the speaker of parliament must be a Sunni Muslim, the Prime Minister a Shia Muslim and the President of the Republic an Iraqi Kurd.

It remains to be seen what options and next moves remain for the Saadrist movement. While the attacks on parliament are not attributed to him or his movement, the ability of the Saadrist bloc to mobilise the streets with particular vigour stands out. In the summer, after the Coordination Framework nominated al Sudani as its candidate for head of government, the streets were flooded with demonstrations and even attacks on Baghdad's protected green zone, the neighbourhood that houses institutions and embassies.