Shafaq News- OPINION

By Ali Hussein Feyli*

After nearly two years of paralysis, the Kurdistan Parliament has returned to session and elected its leadership, but its revival has not resolved the political disputes that disrupted its work, instead raising new questions over participation, boycotts, and the future of consensus among the Kurdistan Region’s political forces.

Between those who view the move as the long-awaited restoration of a legislative institution and those who question the way the session was convened; the current scene can be examined from four perspectives in which past experience intersects with present-day political calculations.

The first is historical. Since 1992, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) have cooperated in keeping Parliament functioning and forming governments through consensus during four of the six legislative terms in the Kurdistan Parliament’s history. At other stages, the Kurdistan Region was divided between two separate administrations or governed through broader coalition arrangements. Across these different configurations, the political equation has remained shaped by geographic divisions, balances of power and influence, and the realities of authority on the ground.

Read more: PUK quits Kurdistan government over parliament dispute

The Kurdistan Parliament itself has experienced four major periods of varying degrees of paralysis and political deadlock:

1- First Paralysis (1994–2002): Internal Conflict and Political Division

Parliament was effectively paralyzed by armed conflict between the two main parties, the KDP and the PUK, and the division of the Kurdistan Region into two separate administrations: the “Yellow Zone,” controlled by the KDP in Erbil and Duhok, and the “Green Zone,” controlled by the PUK in Al-Sulaymaniyah, names derived from the colors associated with the two parties.

Even after the internal fighting ended, the institutional division persisted, and Parliament did not resume unified sessions until Oct. 4, 2002, nearly eight years after the crisis began, despite limited parliamentary activity during that period, which remains one of the longest and most difficult disruptions of legislative work in the Kurdistan Region’s history.

2- Second Paralysis (2015–2017): The Parliamentary Presidency Crisis

During Parliament’s fourth legislative term, sessions stopped for nearly two years after then-Speaker Yousif Mohammed, a member of the Change Movement (Gorran), was prevented from entering Erbil in October 2015 amid political disputes with the KDP, before Parliament eventually resumed its sessions in September 2017.

3- Third Paralysis (2022–2024): The Extension Crisis And Legislative Vacuum

After elections for the sixth parliamentary term could not be held as scheduled in 2022, lawmakers voted to extend the fifth term for another year. On May 30, 2023, however, Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court ruled the extension unconstitutional and declared the parliamentary term expired at the end of its legal mandate.

The decision left the Kurdistan Region without an active legislature until new elections were held in October 2024.

4- Fourth Paralysis (2024–2026): The Parliamentary Presidency Formation Crisis

Although elections for the sixth term were held on Oct. 20, 2024, followed by the inaugural session on Dec. 2 of that year, deep political disagreements prevented lawmakers from completing the election of Parliament’s leadership. Its legislative and oversight functions consequently remained suspended for nearly two years, until the inaugural session resumed and a new leadership was elected on Nov. 4, 2026.

If two years of parliamentary paralysis are dismissed as insignificant when measured against more than three decades of the institution’s history, a more fundamental question emerges: what future awaits a region whose legislature can be brought to a halt so easily?

More than three decades of political struggle, elections, heated debate, consideration and passage of numerous bills —including controversial legislation— annual budget reviews and extraordinary sessions helped establish an institutional arena for political engagement. The relationships that developed among lawmakers over successive terms and the understandings reached between parliamentary blocs, even when neither deep nor durable, provided at least a framework through which communication, political relationships and alliances could continue, contributing to the Kurdistan Region’s stability.

How, then, did political forces with decades of experience in this arena reach a point where Parliament’s doors were closed, only for the institution to return today in this manner while the underlying disagreements remain?

The second perspective requires looking at the scene through the concerns and fears of the opposition.

From the viewpoint of some parties that stayed away from the parliamentary session, their disagreements with the PUK or KDP and their absence from Parliament were neither passing positions nor simply acts of obstinacy. Their previous experiences have made drawing closer to the two dominant parties resemble touching a burning ember, carrying risks and complicated political calculations. It is a stark image, but one that, from the perspective of these parties, is not without foundation.

For the PUK, as one of the two principal parties sharing power in the Kurdistan Region, the boycott is also linked to its disputes with the KDP over the management of institutions, political understandings, and the distribution of responsibilities.

In a political environment where employment opportunities, friendships, alliances and even participation in festivals and public events can be shaped by particular conditions and calculations, such a boycott may reflect not only distrust of the political process but also fears of losing the confidence of party constituencies and supporters or facing fierce criticism and pressure from more hardline elements.

Understanding the nature of that fear and its political cost is therefore important. If such considerations reach the point where political parties prefer withdrawal from Parliament or boycott even amid concerns over the future of the Kurdistan Region as a political entity and the stability of its institutions, the issue extends beyond party politics to questions of homeland and territory. The question then is no longer where they were during parliament’s reopening, but why the people’s house was left without its owners.

The third perspective is one of fairness. As the saying goes, if a candle cannot illuminate its immediate surroundings, how can it light the way for others?

Fairness also requires avoiding sweeping judgments, as it is difficult to know precisely how opposition parties reached their calculations or how prepared each was to take such a decision, with some potentially outside the political understandings that produced the current arrangement, unlike the PUK, which, as a central actor in the political equation, took a clear decision to boycott.

Apart from several lawmakers who attended despite the positions of their parties and whose participation helped secure the required quorum of 52 out of 100 members, the PUK, Kurdistan Islamic Union, Kurdistan Justice Group, New Generation Movement and National Stance Movement did not formally participate as blocs.

Yet there is a considerable difference between knowing that a party decided to boycott and claiming certainty about the motives behind that decision. Judging the intentions of political forces without accounting for the circumstances and experiences that shaped them is not straightforward. To some extent, their caution and silence may reflect the weight they give to previous experiences and political calculations, even in the context of reactivating parliament.

The fourth perspective concerns something that was never as dominant in previous political eras as it is today: the age of cameras and lenses.

A politician’s absence from an event might have been noticed by only a limited number of people in the past, however, today, every absence is recorded and documented, just as every appearance is photographed and broadcast. Absence is no longer merely an individual decision to stay away from a session; it becomes a political issue that generates questions and draws public attention.

Empty seats therefore cease to represent simply an absence from Parliament and become a political message directed as much at the public as at political rivals.

At the center of the Kurdistan Region’s domestic political scene, many disputes remain tied to struggles over balances of power, the distribution of political gains and the broader climate in which politics is conducted. Such conditions make national consensus a difficult and prolonged process.

Amid fear of political costs, concern over internal accusations and the constant calculation of seats and interests, political forces can become preoccupied with determining who should bear responsibility for what happened.

Read more: Kurdistan’s 10th cabinet

When a house catches fire, it may matter who struck the match or who locked the exit, but limiting the debate to those questions without acting to save the house would amount to a historic failure that no price could repair.

* Ali Hussein Feyli, Chairman of the Shafaq Foundation for Culture and Media and former member of the Kurdistan Region Parliament.

This article was originally written in Arabic.