A Vote for Hope

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The strong showing of the Shi'ite religious parties was particularly unsettling to the country's Sunni minority, which saw its historical dominance of Iraqi politics come to a crashing end. "There can be no more denying that there is a split among the Iraqis," says Wamidh Nadhmi, a Baghdad political scientist and moderate Sunni leader. "Now there's an Us and a Them--and They are in power." The Sunnis themselves never got the opportunity to choose, since most of their leaders boycotted the elections. Moderate politicians remained caught between the desire to join the political process and the fear of being tarred as traitors by the extremists and the clerics. Ammar Zain Alabideen, spokesman for the Iraqi Islamic Party, the largest Sunni political grouping, said party officials received "thousands of calls" on election day from Sunnis who wished they could join their Shi'ite and Kurdish neighbors at the polls. "They kept asking us why [we boycotted the election]," says Alabideen. "They said, 'If you hadn't, we could have voted for you.'" Alabideen himself felt conflicted on that Sunday morning. "I was satisfied with our decision to stay out, but I was also sad," he says. "I felt we missed a chance to give something to our people."

Estimates put Sunni participation at 25% or lower. Reaching across the chasm will require statesmanship from the Shi'ite leadership as well as the Sunnis. The Association of Muslim Scholars, an influential Sunni clerical body, declared the vote illegitimate but also said it might be willing to work with the new government. The biggest test: bringing Sunnis into the process of drafting a new constitution, which will be voted on in a fall referendum. If the constitution is ratified, elections for a permanent government will be held by the end of the year. In the meantime, many Iraqis who voted on Sunday have their sights on narrower but no less sensitive goals. The high turnout in the north--perhaps as high as 90%--will probably allow the Kurds to punch above their weight in the Assembly, so expect the perennially thorny issue of Kurdish independence to rise quickly to the top of the parliamentary agenda. Anecdotal evidence suggests that Iraq's women voted in large numbers; with 25% of seats in the Assembly reserved for them, Iraqi women will wield political clout unknown elsewhere in the Middle East. "If anybody thinks we're just going to be ornaments in the Assembly," says Raja al-Khuzai, one of the country's leading women politicians, "they're fooling themselves."