Maliki’s parallel negotiations after the failure to change the votes results

Until few days ago, those who are close to Maliki man­aged to con­vince the Prime Min­is­ter that IHEC made mis­takes with about 750 thou­sand votes (20 seats), and his best option is to insist on re-counting the votes. Today after re-counting about 90% of the votes so far, accord­ing to a state­ment made by the IHEC said on Sat­ur­day that there are no changes in the elec­tion results, Maliki left with no options only to go back to the nego­ti­a­tion process.

Maliki started to run his nego­ti­a­tions on two par­al­lel lines. The first is nego­ti­at­ing with the Iraqi National Alliance (INA) with all its pro­ce­dural con­se­quences (such as the ban on Maliki can­di­dacy by the Sadrists). The sec­ond is nego­ti­at­ing with Allawi’s Al-Iraqiya.

The nego­ti­a­tions with INA:

Send­ing a mes­sage to INA that the ban on Maliki left the “for­mer” Prime Min­is­ter with no choice but to start the talks with Al-Iraqiya to form the biggest bloc in par­lia­ment, and shar­ing of power with Allawi.

Some of the Sadrists under­stood this mes­sage, “Amir Al-Kenani” head of “Al-Ahrar” Bloc (Sadrists polit­i­cal wing), said yes­ter­day that the Sadrists started to ease their posi­tion from Maliki, for the fear of an alliance between the “State of Law” and “Al-Iraqiya”. In real­ity, Al-Kenani is a back-bencher in the Sadrists Move­ment, and two main Sadrists lead­ers denied lift­ing the ban on Maliki.

Sadrists spokesman Salah Al-Ubaidi said:

The Sadrists are still at their posi­tion of non-approval of Maliki’s nom­i­na­tion for a sec­ond term.

More plainly, Sadrists leader Baha’a Al-Araji told Elaph the following:

We [Sadrists] don’t care about Maliki’s mes­sages, The Sadrists Move­ment pre­sented their own con­di­tions for this [PM] post … and found that these con­di­tions do not apply to Maliki.

The nego­ti­a­tions with Al-Iraqiya:

Their are some kind of indi­rect nego­ti­a­tions between “State of Law” (SoL) and Al-Iraqiya started by the medi­a­tion of “Has­san Al-A’alwi” (joined Al-Iraqiya few months ago). The choice of Al-A’alawi is more inter­est­ing than the news itself (read at the bottom).

Maliki’s media adviser Ali Al-Moussawi revealed Sat­ur­day that a meet­ing will take place between Maliki and Allawi soon. Maliki has stressed dur­ing his meet­ing with Al-A’alawi that the dis­cus­sion between the two Lists will focus on the details and the obsta­cles to the for­ma­tion of a rul­ing coali­tion accepted by all partners.

The funny part is that a day later, another Maliki’s media adviser “Yaseen Majeed” denied [Youtube video] the news of a meet­ing between Prime Min­is­ter Al-Maliki and the leader of the Al-Iraqiya List, Iyad Allawi, say­ing that these are media rumors only.

Maliki’s fail­ure to change the votes results, led Al-Iraqiya to go back to what it con­sid­ers a con­sti­tu­tional right to form a gov­ern­ment through its major­ity seats. Al-Iraqiya asked the Iraqi pres­i­dent Jalal Tal­a­bani to show his con­sti­tu­tional com­mit­ment and ask Al-Iraqiya to form the government.

Has­san Al-A’alwi

Until a few months ago, the Iraqi Shi­ite writer and thinker was known as one of the most hated among the Iraqi extrem­ists Shi­ites. In his book “The author­ity Shi­ites and the Iraqi Shi­ites” shows his view on how the Shi­ites who came to power after the occu­pa­tion (2003) are try­ing oppress the real Iraqi Shiites.

Al-A’alawi is nego­ti­at­ing with Maliki despite that Al-A’alawi crit­i­cized Maliki in book, and he con­tin­u­ously attack the Shi­ites par­ties and polit­i­cal fig­urs on Satel­lite TV chan­nels, he told this story:

I met Maliki in 2003, and he told me that he is plan­ning to go back to Syria where he came from, because Dawa Party lead­er­ship will give him even a small offi­cial posi­tion in the government.