An Iraqi man reads a poster near an election station in Baghdad on Wednesday. The poster reads, "Iraq is calling you, don't keep your vote away, vote/ my vote, my country, my future ". E
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Sheikh Salah al-Obeidi, a Sadr spokesman in the Shi'ite holy city of Najaf, said that the movement wants to break the stranglehold of the parties of Maliki and Hakim on provincial councils by supporting independent candidates. The Sadrists will not directly participate, he said, because "if we make our [own electoral] list, what will happen is a quarrel between the parties. We do not want this." Nor will Sadr publicly support any of the major parties. "We will not support any one of the parties at all, because we have seen that the councils haven't been useful to the people at all, they've exploited all the governorates for the benefits of the party that controls them," Sheikh Salah said. "We do not want to make the coming councils too controlled by political parties. Yes, they can participate and be represented, but really we don't want them to dominate."
The Sunnis, for their part, plan to avoid a repeat of 2005, when most of the community that once ruled Iraq boycotted the local polls, allowing Shi'ites and Kurdish politicians to assume control even in cities where Sunnis predominated. This time around, they're hoping to restore some of their lost political clout, according to Omar Almashhadani, a spokesperson for the Tawafuk movement, the largest Sunni bloc with 44 of the 275 seats in parliament. "These councils were elected in 2005 but most of the Sunnis didn't contest those elections. So we've got problems in places like Mosul and others where the Kurds for example have a big share of the local councils, but that doesn't represent their numbers," he said. "These elections will make the numbers more real."