Shafaq News

Iraq's parliament is 70 days past the constitutional deadline to elect a president, with a new session set for April 11, and whether it produces a result or another postponement, the constitution offers no answer for what happens if it does not.

This is not an anomaly. It is the operating logic of post-2003 Iraqi governance.

Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq has formed ten governments, none on schedule. The shortest delay —the 2014 government of Haider al-Abadi— took 131 days, compressed by international pressure and the existential emergency of ISIS's advance on Baghdad. The longest, the 2022 government of Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, required 382 days, passing through armed clashes, the storming of the heavily fortified Green Zone, which houses diplomatic buildings, and the wholesale withdrawal of Muqtada al-Sadr’s movement bloc (The Sadrist) from parliament. The current impasse, at 148 days since the November 2025 elections and counting, sits closer to the norm than the exception.

Read more: A political norm shaping Iraq’s governments

"Since 2003 until today, governments have not actually stabilized, except for the 2006 and 2010 administrations," political analyst Daoud al-Halfaya told Shafaq News, referring to Nouri al-Maliki's two terms, themselves born of prolonged deadlock. The pattern, al-Halfaya argued, is not accidental: "Successive governments have been staffed not with strong national figures but with weak ones, undermining the capacity for decisive decision-making and any prospect of institutional stability."

The constitution mandates that a president be elected within 30 days of parliament's first session. That session convened on December 29, 2025. The deadline passed on January 29, 2026, unmet and unremarked upon by any enforcement mechanism, because none exists. What followed was a constitutional crisis in the legal sense, but at the same time, it is something more corrosive: a constitutional norm treated, by all parties, as optional.

The architecture of that weakness was partly assembled by judicial fiat. On March 25, 2010, the Federal Supreme Court issued Decision No. 25/Federal/2010, ruling that the constitutional term "largest parliamentary bloc" could refer either to the list winning the most seats in an election, or to a coalition assembled inside parliament after results were ratified. The practical transferred the right to form a government away from Ayad Allawi, whose Al-Iraqiya List had won the most seats, and toward al-Maliki, who had not.

The ruling has reverberated through every government formation since. It is widely seen as having eroded public reverence toward both the constitution and the court, precisely because it appeared to subordinate electoral outcomes to post-election political maneuvering.

Iraq's Supreme Judicial Council President, Judge Faiq Zaidan, has himself acknowledged the damage, describing Article 76 of the constitution as among its most contentious provisions. A literal reading, he has argued, would restrict the "largest bloc" designation to whichever list won the most votes; allowing post-election coalitions to claim that status distorts voter intent and undermines legitimacy.

Read more: Iraq’s Parliament “Largest Bloc”: A Renewed Struggle over Power

Ihsan al-Shammari, head of the Iraqi Political Thinking Center, told Shafaq News that "a serious error was committed in 2010 in interpreting the largest bloc," and that the Federal Court's ruling must be reconsidered. al-Shammari agree with Judge Zaidan, calling for a constitutional amendment or revision of parliamentary bylaws to prevent further cycles of delay.

Al-Shammari also identifies the emergence of rival Shia leaderships as a compounding factor: "Shia parties have always disagreed over who assumes the premiership and how ministerial portfolios are distributed, and the rise of new political leaderships has complicated matters further, because these figures threaten traditional hierarchies —leading to maneuvers around the largest bloc even when it commands genuine popular support."

Aqeel al-Rudaini, spokesperson for former Prime Minister al-Abadi's al-Nasr coalition, is more direct: "Quota politics, internal power struggles, political money and influence among parties, and the presence of weapons outside state authority have all contributed to delaying government formation." The last item on that list —armed factions operating beyond the reach of the state— is not a peripheral concern. It is a negotiating variable.

According to Al-Shammari, the regional interference [especially from the United States and Iran] sometimes prevents government formation outright or places a veto on a specific candidate, directly affecting the parliamentary confidence vote." Al-Rudaini also stressed that "every ethnic community and political bloc carries regional influence behind it, and this damages Iraq's national interest while deepening internal divisions."

Al-Halfaya frames the consequence plainly: political competition has shifted to "competing for the backing of external powers rather than policy programs," removing national interest from the calculus entirely.

The two-thirds quorum requirement for the presidential vote, imposed by the Federal Supreme Court since 2022, has made the calculus more punishing still. Any bloc controlling more than a third of parliament's 329 seats holds effective veto power over the entire process —the so-called "blocking third." What was designed as a consensus mechanism has become, in practice, a tool for extraction: no presidency, no prime ministerial mandate, no government, until the holdouts are satisfied.

In an attempt to break the pattern, the Speaker warned MPs this week that absences from the April 11 session would be formally recorded and penalized with a one-million-dinar (approximately $763) salary deduction —the first-time attendance at a presidential vote has carried any stated consequence. In a political economy where ministerial portfolios are negotiated in billions, the figure measures the distance between the penalty available and the stakes being protected.

The cost of this paralysis goes beyond politics. Economist Nabil al-Marsoumi has warned that Iraq faces a salary shortfall of five trillion dinars (approximately $3.8 billion) for May, the result of declining oil revenues compounded by disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz. "Iraq requires more than nine trillion dinars (approximately $6.87 billion) monthly to cover public sector salaries and social welfare," al-Marsoumi told Shafaq News, "and any shortfall hits citizens directly."

A caretaker government, legally prohibited from passing budgets, signing major contracts, or approving structural spending, cannot address the gap. Caretaker restrictions have separately frozen between eight and ten billion dollars in contracts spanning infrastructure, water, and services, with over 6,000 administrative decisions in suspension.

Read more: Parliament paralysis: Divisions and pressure expose Iraq’s fragile system

The 220 lawmakers who signed the petition demanding the April 11 session represent genuine pressure from within the legislature. Pressure, in Iraq's post-2003 political grammar, is not the same as accountability. The constitution sets deadlines, but does not punish those who miss them. Neither legal mechanism compels parliament to convene, nor court have the authority —or the institutional standing— to enforce compliance. Al-Shammari's prescription, shared by Judge Zaidan, is a constitutional amendment or revision of parliamentary internal rules. Those proposals have circulated in various forms since 2010 and have not advanced.

The Federal Supreme Court has scheduled its own ruling on the constitutional implications of the missed deadline for April 14, three days after parliament's session. The court will interpret the violation only after the political class has already attempted to move past it, a sequencing that captures, with accidental precision, how Iraq's institutions relate to its constitution: commentary follows action; accountability trails power.

Iraq's political class has not failed to build a government. It has succeeded, repeatedly, in building a system in which not building one is a viable —sometimes optimal— political strategy.

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.