Why Iraq’s Politics Haven’t Changed

Excerpt

The Iraq of today is marked by two conflicting feelings: cautious hope for the future and a recognition of the country’s endemic corruption. The good news is that the country’s electoral politics are finally maturing. Voters are punishing proximity to Iran and rewarding genuinely patriotic national leaders. This surging sense of Iraqi identity has made Tehran’s once-iron grip on its neighbor feel increasingly uncertain.

The bad news is equally stark. The man parliament has just designated as prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi, is a walking embodiment of the rot that has poisoned Iraq for decades.

Zaidi has pledged to make Iraq “a balanced country, regionally and internationally.” Translated from diplomatic speak, that means he promises neutrality in the conflict between Washington and Tehran. It is a position that captures the new patriotic mood sweeping Iraq, one so strong that even the pro-Iran Shia bloc, the Coordination Framework, felt compelled to say that it was “monitoring with concern” the Iran War, but fell short of taking sides or expressing support toward Iran.

The shift did not happen by accident. In the 2025 parliamentary elections, Iran-aligned factions absorbed a painful lesson from their 2021 collapse, when brazen boasts of loyalty to Tehran cost them more than 100 seats. Chastened, they rewrote their script. They stopped calling themselves Tehran’s foot soldiers and started siding with the Iraqi state against Iran’s proxies, even if they were allied with these same proxies. As it started expressing support for Iraq against Iran and its Iraqi proxies, the Shia Coordination Framework, once dismissed as Tehran’s proxy bloc, surged from fewer than 50 seats to more than 175 in the 325-seat parliament, comfortably clearing the majority threshold.

Hussain Abdul-Hussain is a research fellow at The Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where he focuses on the Gulf region and Yemen.