Comparative Government 101: Iraq
Gerritt posted Tuesday regarding this week’s drama in Iraq, where a meeting of the newly elected National Assembly failed to yield a prime minister:
Iraq the Vote: Election? Democracy? [I think not!](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9275-2005Mar29.html)
Nothing personal, Gerritt, but what’s going on in Iraq actually is democracy, and isn’t even that uncommon in parliamentary systems of government.
Remember that in a parliamentary system, the prime minister (head of government) is usually the leader of the majority party in the main legislative body; the PM then picks other legislators to serve as cabinet ministers (US: secretaries). “The government” in parliamentary politics refers to the PM and the slate of ministers, not the entire structure as it does in the US. In turn, the government can be taken down by a majority vote of the legislature at any time, called a “vote of no confidence.” When Americans hear “the government falls,” we think rioting, chaos, civil war; when people in countries parliamentary systems hear that their government has fallen, they think “oh great, a new election in six weeks.”
If no one party gets a majority of the seats in the legislature, you get one of two things. You could have a minority government, where the party with a plurality of the seats forms a government on its own, with unspoken acceptance by enough other parties to keep the government from falling. Canada’s Liberals did this last year with just 36.71% of their vote. Or you can have a coalition government where two or more parties make a formal alliance, with cabinet ministers named from most or all of the parties involved. One variant of this is the “grand coalition” or “national unity government” where both of the country’s leading parties participate; this is the case in Israel right now, where both right-wing Likud and left-wing Labor are allied in a coalition led by Likud PM Ariel Sharon. Both of these types of government are rather unstable, because all it usually takes to tear the whole thing down is one or two parties deciding they could gain position in a new election.
Even countries with a stable, mature political culture have parties flake out of coalitions at the last second. The problem is exacerbated in Iraq because Saddam-era dictatorship didn’t encourage the development of competent legislators, but the system is democratic in nature.
29 March 2005 / 0 Comments / Tags: politics