Iraqis Maneuver Amid Signs No Party Will Win Majority (Update2)

March 10 (Bloomberg) -- Iraq faces tough political coalition-building as leaders maneuvered amid indications that no party would win a majority when initial results from the parliamentary election are announced.

Initial results will be announced no earlier than tomorrow, the United Nations special representative to Iraq, Ad Melkert, said today. Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission had said it would give a provisional vote count yesterday and then announced it hadn’t yet tallied enough ballots. Final results may not be certified until the end of the month.

“Iraqis have the right to know as soon as possible what is the outcome,” Melkert said in a televised news conference in Baghdad. “It is a very complicated process. On the basis of the information I received this morning, I am confident it will be possible to have by tomorrow preliminary results.”

Jockeying over positions in the new administration is already under way. Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi said yesterday that the next president of the country must be an Arab because “this country is Arab and an Arab should be on top.” The current president, Kurdish politician Jalal Talabani, has already declared his intention to stay on in the job. The president is elected by parliament.

The main competitors in the election are Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law alliance and the Iraqiya party of a former premier, Ayad Allawi. Coalition-building is essential to the U.S. plan to withdraw troops as Iraq establishes a stable government. American officials insist the pullout will go ahead.

U.S. Commander

“I think they all realize that no one will have an outright majority,” General Ray Odierno, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, said on CNN. “So, they know that they are going to have to form a coalition government.”

He said he’s “confident” U.S. troops will withdraw on schedule.

The electoral commission said it would recheck 30 ballot boxes in the province of Dohuk because of problems “related to the receipt of the boxes,” the Aswat al-Iraq news agency reported yesterday, citing an unidentified official on the panel. Each box includes at least 400 votes, it said.

Commission spokesman Qasim al-Aboudi said late yesterday on al-Iraqiya television that the panel had received fewer complaints about the balloting than members had thought. The highest number of complaints was in Basra province, where 103 people said they weren’t happy with the vote, and the lowest in Maysan province, according to the spokesman.

‘Neck and Neck’

Al-Maliki’s and Allawi’s lists of candidates may each get less than a third of the 325 seats at stake, according to reports from Iraqi media. Turnout in the March 7 vote was 62.4 percent, the commission said. Almost 19 million Iraqis were registered to vote.

Allawi’s list is “neck and neck” with al-Maliki’s bloc, Allawi’s official spokeswoman, Maysoon al-Damluji, said yesterday in a phone interview from Baghdad. “We are doing pretty well.”

Al-Damluji said that Allawi’s group had success with voters in Baghdad and the western provinces. She declined to provide details until results are released. Al-Damluji is a lawmaker in the current parliament and a member of Allawi’s alliance.

Initial signs are that the vote will be divided along sectarian and ethnic lines. Al-Maliki’s alliance is leading in nine predominately Shiite Muslim provinces in the south, Iraq’s Sumaria Television reported. Abbas al-Bayati, an official from al-Maliki’s coalition, told the Associated Press the group also did well in the mixed city of Baghdad.

Sunni Votes

Allawi’s Iraqiya, which campaigned for a non-sectarian Iraq, was winning in four mainly Sunni Muslim provinces in the center and north of the country, Sumaria and the Iraq News Agency reported. Vice-President al-Hashemi, a Sunni, is a key figure in the Iraqiya party.

An alliance of the two main Kurdish parties, Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party, was sweeping the Kurds’ autonomous zone in the northeast, with other Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni parties running behind, Sumaria and the INA said.

The ruling coalition that emerges from the election must resolve disputes over sharing oil revenue among regions and whether to include the oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the Kurdish autonomous region in the north, as well as cope with violence between Shiites and Sunnis. The parties must agree to share out government posts including the influential Oil Ministry.

Oil Reserves

Iraq’s 115 billion-barrel oil reserves place it third in the world behind Saudi Arabia and Iran. The country pumped about 2.4 million barrels a day last month, according to Bloomberg estimates.

Once official results are announced, Talabani will have 15 days to convene a new parliament. The first session elects a speaker and two deputy speakers. Next, a new president is elected, requiring a two-thirds majority. The president has 15 days to task the leader of the largest bloc with forming a government.

Parties will probably spend months haggling over the makeup of a coalition government, said Wael Abdel Latif of the National Iraqi Alliance, a major Shiite Muslim bloc.

“The formation of the government may face big problems if the results are close and there is no clear winner,” Latif said in an interview in Baghdad. Preliminary results showed “a very close race,” he said.

It could take more than six months to form a government, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy said in a March 3 report.

Risk of Violence

Violence may escalate if the majority Shiites and the minority Sunni Muslims and Kurds aren’t all included in a coalition, said Ahmed Ali, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. That would thwart U.S. ambitions to leave a stable Iraq as it withdraws its troops.

U.S. troop strength is due to shrink from 96,000 to 50,000 by Sept. 1, and the remaining forces will leave Iraq by the end of 2011, under a schedule set last year by President Barack Obama.

The parliamentary vote was the second since Saddam Hussein’s overthrow by U.S. forces in 2003. More than 6,200 candidates competed for seats in the legislature, the Council of Representatives.

To contact the reporters on this story: Caroline Alexander in London at calexander1@bloomberg.net; Daniel Williams in Cairo at dwilliams41@bloomberg.net.