Shafaq News

Iraq’s Council of Representatives closed its first legislative term on June 1, having approved almost no substantive legislation, ending a period in which political deadlock over cabinet formation consumed the chamber’s first months and left a long queue of strategic laws untouched. Nine ministerial portfolios remain vacant, and the parliament will not reconvene until July 1.

Laws governing federal oil revenue, electoral reform, and public finance have been pending for months, in some cases for years, and the brief window between the end of recess and the close of the fiscal year leaves limited time for meaningful legislative action.

Iraq’s November 2025 elections produced a fragmented parliament anchored by the Coordination Framework, a broad alliance of Shia political parties with varying ties to Iran that collectively form the largest parliamentary bloc. Under Iraq’s post-2003 power-sharing system, known as muhasasa, state positions are distributed across the country’s main ethnic and sectarian communities. The arrangement was designed to prevent majoritarian exclusion; its cost is a government formation process that is structurally slow and frequently hostage to intra-coalition disputes.

From the inaugural session on December 29, 2025, through mid-May 2026, the government of Mohammed Shia al-Sudani continued in a caretaker capacity, without a mandate to pursue new policy. The parliament that sat alongside it was not idle, but it was not legislating.

Speaker Haibet al-Halbousi, a Sunni politician from the Taqaddum party who won 208 votes in the opening session, presided over a chamber that spent the bulk of its first fifteen sittings on the procedural work of constituting its own committees, a process that in previous cycles moved considerably faster.

Parliament finally granted a confidence vote to Prime Minister Ali Faleh al-Zaidi on May 14, approving 14 of 23 ministerial nominees in a session described by multiple attendees as contentious. Nominees for the interior, higher education, and planning portfolios failed to secure approval; votes on defense, labor, housing, and culture were deferred with no date set. Al-Zaidi, a 41-year-old businessman with no prior political office, was nominated by the Coordination Framework as a consensus candidate after the United States effectively vetoed former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s return. He took the constitutional oath with a partial cabinet and has governed with acting ministers filling the vacant posts since.

The confidence vote came barely two weeks before the mandatory June 1 recess, leaving no viable legislative window. Calls from within the Coordination Framework for an emergency session during the recess to resolve the remaining nine portfolios have not produced results.

Read more: What does Iraq's new government promise? A guide to Ali Al-Zaidi's ministerial program

A Patriotic Union of Kurdistan lawmaker, Harem Kamal Agha, confirmed at a press conference that the vacancies will be addressed only after parliament reconvenes in July. Coordination Framework MP Amer al-Fayez stated separately that political blocs had yet to submit nominees, making any session before July 1 unlikely.

Lawmaker Hassan Warioush, of the al-Nahj al-Watani bloc, traced the legislative shortfall directly to the incomplete executive. “The parliament has not yet taken its real role,” he told Shafaq News, adding that nine ministries remain without confirmed ministers.

Warioush explained that most parliamentary committees lack permanent chairs and are being managed temporarily by their most senior members, noting that chairmanship allocations follow the same sectarian and ethnic balance that governs cabinet formation. “The selection of committee chairs is waiting for the ministers to be decided,” he said. “If a minister comes from one community, the committee chair goes to another to achieve political balance.” The result is a legislature whose internal architecture remains provisional.

Yazidi MP Mahma Khalil called the current session is weaker even than the fifth,” citing the electoral system, the absence of centralized decision-making within political blocs, and the compounding pressures of a prolonged formation period.

Read more: Ali al-Zaidi named Iraq's prime minister: Easy nomination, harder road ahead

After more than six months since the first sitting, Khalil argued, the parliament has exercised neither its legislative nor its oversight function in any meaningful sense. The legislation Iraqis most urgently need, he said, from a federal budget to the long-delayed oil and gas law, to revenue maximization and privatization frameworks, has not been touched. “The parliament does not yet have a clear legislative program or a roadmap for addressing the major issues.”

Former MP Raheem al-Darraji, who served in previous parliamentary terms and has observed the chamber’s accountability function over time, told Shafaq News that the capacity for genuine executive scrutiny has been eroding for years. “Oversight during recent years has not been at the level it was ten or fifteen years ago, the executive authority has exerted pressure on some oversight bodies, and this has been reflected in the level of scrutiny applied to corruption files and government contracts.”

Al-Darraji called on parliament to summon the head of the Board of Supreme Audit and other accountability officials to account publicly for the constraints on their work. Individual legislators are pursuing corruption dossiers, he acknowledged, but their efforts remain disconnected from any institutional framework. “The overall performance of the parliament in legislation and oversight remains below expectations, despite the slogans raised about fighting corruption.”

The integrity and electricity committees have conducted field visits to government institutions since the term began, but the lawmakers have assessed these as insufficient given the scale of financial irregularities under active discussion. The federal budget itself requires structural revision before it can be presented for a vote, with Kurdish lawmaker from the PUK, Sirwa Mohammed, indicating that prospects for passing a comprehensive budget law in 2026 are slim. The government is expected to submit spending allocations for salaries and public expenditures as an interim measure.

Compounding the pressure is the oil and gas law, a piece of legislation whose absence has left the legal relationship between Baghdad and the Kurdistan Region’s energy sector in a state of managed ambiguity for nearly two decades. Electoral law amendments that will govern the next cycle must also clear parliament with enough lead time for the Independent High Electoral Commission to implement them. None of these files will move before July.

A parliament that spent six months forming itself now has to govern, and the files waiting after July 1 are problems that previous chambers deferred, and this one inherited alongside everything else. The budget has no vote, nine ministries have acting ministers, and the oil and gas law, pending since 2007, will test a coalition that has not yet demonstrated it can agree on anything harder than a confidence motion.

Baghdad has seen reform agendas announced with similar urgency before, and most of them settled quietly into the same backlog they were meant to clear. The al-Zaidi government has a program, the chamber behind it is still finding its shape, and July arrives in ten days.

Read more: 2026 budget: Iraq confronts unprecedented fiscal strain

Written and edited by Shafaq News staff.