On October 20, 2024, after a two-year delay, Kurds went to the polls to elect a new Kurdistan Parliament. The results did not surprise; Masoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), and Bafel Talabani’s Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) retained the majority in their respective territories. Despite opposition accusations of fraud, most parties accept the election results. Only one Islamist party refused and instead announced it will boycott the new parliament.
There is an irony within the Iraqi Kurdistan Region: Most Iraqi Kurds are desperate for change—many of those risking their lives to flee across the English Channel, for example, are Iraqi Kurds—but the region’s residents do not believe semi-regular elections will address their fundamental concerns.
The problem is that Iraqi Kurdistan’s major political parties maintain militias to enforce their will. While the region has held six elections since 1991, they have only served to cement the foundations of the Barzani-Talabani family duopoly.
Iraqi Kurdistan’s major political parties maintain militias to enforce their will.
Kurdish officials point to 72 percent of registered Kurdish voters casting ballots, a significant increase from 2021 when the figure failed to break 50 percent; however, a DrawMedia analysis points out that close to one million potential voters did not register at all, and many additional voters spoiled their ballots in protest. At best, perhaps only 55 percent of eligible voting age population cast ballots.
The reason why voter turnout increased has less to do with growing faith in the system, and more with the large party mobilization efforts to compel party members to register and vote or risk their jobs. The KDP and PUK, for example, forced peshmerga and security forces and their families to vote, often first showing their ballots to supervisors. Both Barzani and Talabani rhetoric and incitement was among its most polarized since KDP founder Mullah Mustafa Barzani attacked his rivals within the Kurdish liberation movement more than 60 years ago.
The election campaign was devoid of substance. Whereas the PUK once depicted itself as an ideological party, in contrast to the family-dominated KDP, both parties are today family enterprises. Neither KDP nor PUK voiced a clear program, often alternating between Kurdish nationalist rhetoric and disparagement of opponents instead of offering substantive policy discussion. Because parties own most media, Kurdish channels often did not cover any opposition to the party or individual that owned the station. Social media was a cesspool of trolling and dirty tricks, including artificial intelligence-generated false recordings meant to embarrass or incite.
Neither KDP nor PUK addressed the quality of democracy, or political repression of free speech or abuses of human rights.
The Iraqi Kurdish population, meanwhile, cares less about personality than the economy. Youth unemployment and underemployment remain high. The Kurdistan Region’s public sector is proportionately on par with Cuba. For years, the Kurdish government has lagged in salary payment, sometimes by six months; over the last decade, the Kurdistan Regional Government paid public salaries on time only in 2019 and 2022, often blaming oil revenue disputes with Baghdad for cash shortfalls. Both parties promised to pay public servants’ salaries on time, but did not detail how they would fix the system.
Neither KDP nor PUK addressed the quality of democracy, or political repression of free speech or abuses of human rights. Both parties remained silent on abuses of women’s rights, including honor crimes and harassment, both of which remain at crisis levels.
The danger is that party leaders may be so ensconced in their own circles of sycophancy that they do not understand that the polls reflect an illusion of their party’s own making rather than the popular mood. Masoud’s son and KDP Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, for example, said on October 29 that the polls are “the real” result of the Iraqi Kurdish peoples’ views, and all Kurds must “must” accept this.
To believe he has a mandate when none exists, and schisms deepen between ordinary Kurds and their leadership, is to risk regional stability. Should the United States or Europe make the same mistake as Masrour and channel their engagement through him rather than through direct outreach to ordinary Kurds, they risk having Kurds believe that Washington supports their oppressors rather than the Kurds writ large.
Iraqi Kurdistan likes to depict itself as both a democracy and pro-Western. Elections notwithstanding, the first claim is false; the second is increasingly on shaky ground.
