Baghdad - Iraq's planned election for January was again in doubt Tuesday, after an election official said that the vice president's rejection of an electoral law governing the poll left little hope of the vote taking place on time. "It will be impossible to hold elections any time in January ... We are suspending preparations for the elections until the controversy over the veto has been resolved," Electoral Commission official Qassim al-Abudi said.
At the heart of the row is the issue of allocating expatriate votes for Iraqis abroad for the January 18 election.
In the latest twist in the convoluted passage of the bill, Iraqi lawmakers on Monday approved the latest version of the law to the presidency - but without including amendments requested by Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi when he vetoed a previous version on November 19.
Al-Hashemi on Tuesday threatened to veto the law, saying it was "unconstitutional" and "unfair" and a move that "set a grave precedent that will have a negative impact on the political process as a whole."
Al-Hashemi, a Sunni Muslim, wants the law to allow for 15 per cent of seats in parliament to be reserved for expatriate Iraqis, most of whom are thought to be Sunnis, and members of ethnic and religious minorities.
But in its latest form, the law that says expatriates will vote in the coming election as though they were in their home provinces.
"We can expect al-Hashemi to veto the law," former oil minister Ibrahim Bahr al-Ulum told the German Press Agency dpa.
Failure to failure to find a compromise would plunge country into "trouble and a constitutional void," he warned, saying it would be "no problem to delay the elections a week or two in order to achieve a consensus and ensure the success of the elections."
Sunni lawmakers argue that the proposed law favours the Shiite Muslim majority and Kurdish Iraqis.
The government of the northern semi-autonomous Kurdish region had threatened to boycott the polls if the scheme for calculating the number of seats for each province was not revised.
The first version of the law, passed after months of wrangling, resulted in a net loss of seats for the Kurdish region.
But the amended version passed Monday night addressed Kurdish concerns by revising the system for calculating how many deputies each province will send to the new parliament.
Iraq's constitution holds that the parliament shall consist of one deputy per 100,000 Iraqis. The revised law uses population figures from 2005, augmented by 2.8-per-cent per year.
The increase will be applied to all provinces, across the board, erasing the net loss in representation from the Kurdish provinces.
Under the constitution, the law must be passed 60 days before the elections take place, and elections must take place before the end of January.
Shiite Muslims have requested that the voting take place before January 23, to accommodate their religious holiday of Arbaine.
"The biggest loser (in this debate) is the Iraqi people," said former minister of immigration and refugees Pascal Warda.
"I hope that the elections will be held tomorrow," she said. "This is the public's demand."
