Baghdad - "Going to the polls this January will be riskier than ever before," 22-year-old Iraqi student Said al-Zamli said Friday, days after lawmakers passed an elections law that cleared the way for elections to be held in January. "I'm not just talking about the security concerns," he said. "I'm talking about the risk of not choosing the right people."
"The last elections produced incompetent and undisciplined representatives. Instead of looking after the interests of the people and attending parliamentary sessions, they preferred to enjoy the benefits of being a lawmaker and spend their time traveling."
Following weeks of deadlock over the thorny question of voting in the disputed northern Iraqi city of Kirkuk, Iraqi lawmakers on Sunday agreed on a last-minute compromise to allow elections to take place before the end of January, as constitutionally mandated.
Many Iraqi Kurds hope to make the city, and its nearby oil fields, the capital of a future independent state. Arab and Turkmen politicians view the region as an integral part of Iraq.
The debate had centred on whether Kirkuk's voter-registration rolls from 2009 or 2004 should be used. Arab and Turkmen politicians from the city accuse the Kurds of stacking the voter rolls in their favour.
The compromise will allow politicians to challenge the vote in areas that showed a population increase of more than 5 per cent.
Some 18 million Iraqis will be eligible to vote in 52,000 polling stations across the country, according to the United Nations and Iraq's electoral commission.
"Iraqi voters will have a greater responsibility than ever before when they choose who will represent them in the next parliament," said Mahmoud Othman, a member of parliament with the Kurdistan Alliance.
"We must participate in the elections," Walid al-Rubaie a 42-year-old retired soldier, agreed. "Boycotting the polls will not solve our problems or help us out of the situation we are in."
Sawsan Hashim, a 37-year-old civil servant from Baghdad, said she wasn't sure if she would vote in January's polls, or, if so, how she would vote.
"But the next elections will be crucial in putting an end to the mistrust between the parties, and the mistrust between the politicians who left the country (under Saddam Hussein) and those who stayed," she said.
"Innocent civilians from all communities have been the victims of this rivalry and these mutual recriminations," she added, speculating that religious parties would continue to lose ground to secular parties, as they did in last January's provincial polls.
In the four years since the last parliamentary polls, "the picture has become clear," Hashim said.
"We see how damaged the religious parties are. This will probably become worse in the next election because of the emergence of powerful secular forces that will probably have a strong influence in the upcoming elections," she predicted.
