Ruling Parties Face Challenge in Kurdish Vote

SULAYMANIYAH, Iraq -- It is election season in Iraq's Kurdish region, and the campaigning here was perhaps most remarkable for how ordinary it seemed.

Barham Salih, a veteran politician and candidate for the region's prime minister, jostled through the crowd. Whistles of his admirers pierced through blaring songs. Campaign posters offered generic pledges: "What we promise, we deliver." "It even involves kissing babies," Salih shouted, amid a gaggle of girls singing, "The flag of freedom is the flag of Kurdistan." "Kurdish politics have evolved," he added.

They have evolved, but possibly not in the way Salih was hoping. Voters in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq go to the polls Saturday to elect their president and 111-seat parliament. And the election may redraw the political map here. For the first time in a generation, the two ruling Kurdish parties face a real opposition, one that is emerging from within their ranks and is determined to hold the parties accountable.

Its success could mean the undoing of a formula that has made the Kurdish region an example of prosperity to the rest of a turbulent country: the exchange of plurality for stability.

Muhammad Tofiq calls it "a turning point."

A former leader of one of the parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, the chain-smoking Tofiq is a candidate on the dissident list, known as Change. "Everybody needs change, and everybody feels they need to change the situation. If we don't change the system, then I think the system will collapse."

More than 500 candidates are running for parliament. Massoud Barzani, the incumbent president and head of the other ruling party, the Kurdish Democratic Party, faces five challengers. But the real tension is between Tofiq's Change list and the two ruling parties, which have agreed on a joint slate for the elections.

No one expects the ruling parties to lose their majority. In fact, the real contest may be largely in Sulaymaniyah, where the Patriotic Union, along with its dissidents, draws its greatest support. But many will be watching how many seats the Change list wins, as a barometer of the ruling parties' staying power and the discontent they must reckon with. More than 15 seats would be considered a victory for the opposition, analysts said.

"Every day they are getting more popularity," said Asos Hardi, a columnist and newspaper editor. "They're the big surprise of the election."

Politics is intimate here, with larger-than-life personalities. Tofiq and the Change list's founder, Nosherwan Mustafa, were longtime confidants and lieutenants of Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president and head of the Patriotic Union. At least six other Talabani colleagues have joined their defection.

Still, candidates of the Change list don't seem to differ all that much from the ruling parties in matters of high politics. Both sides endorse a secular Kurdish nationalism that has driven the movement since the days of Barzani's father, the legendary guerrilla leader Mullah Mustafa Barzani. But the burgeoning issues that are proving so dangerous to Iraq's stability -- a fight over a hydrocarbon law to share revenue and manage Iraq's sprawling reserves and negotiations over a disputed border between Kurdish and Arab Iraq -- seem peripheral in this contest. Although Change leaders urge negotiations with Baghdad, they focus more on domestic issues, namely the style of the two ruling parties. "Power corrupts," said Tofiq, who left the Patriotic Union in December 2006.

Even with the prosperity here, many seem disenchanted with entrenched corruption. Complaints are rife about unemployment, poor schools, a lack of housing, shortages of electricity and water, nepotism and the parties' interference in nearly all aspects of life.