00:00Well, let's get some analysis now. France 24's International Affairs Editor, Philip Tull, is with me.
00:05Good to see you, Philip. Just lay out for us how today's vote is taking place and what the main challenges are.
00:11Right. Well, first of all, as we've been seeing in that report, it's not easy.
00:15The outgoing Prime Minister al-Sahdani, Mohammed Sheikh al-Sahdani, is not guaranteed a second term,
00:23although he may well come top in the vote.
00:26So there may be a very long process afterwards with discussions going on between Shia, Sunni and Kurd representatives in the government
00:36to try to see who they would agree on as a future candidate for Prime Minister.
00:41So there are challenges right the way down the line.
00:44And one of the biggest challenges, I think, facing the candidates in Iraq is the fact that many young people in the country are disillusioned with politics.
00:53They just see the same old faces are coming along every time.
00:56They say that nothing is really changing in Iraq.
00:59And that is why we've seen this low turnout.
01:02There was low turnout pretty much this morning from first reports on the AFP newswires.
01:08And I think there's a lot of concern that it could be even lower than the 41 percent that we saw in the lost elections in 2021.
01:14So it's by no means a foregone conclusion that Mohammed Sheikh al-Sahdani will be the next Prime Minister of Iraq.
01:24And whoever it is who's going to take over the country will have a lot of very important decisions to make
01:31and a number of challenges which they will have to take on.
01:36Well, Philip, you hinted there that there is expected not to be a very high turnout.
01:41Why are voters in Iraq so disillusioned?
01:43Right. Well, I think that one of the main reasons is that they don't see anything progressing very quickly in the country.
01:51There is also a feeling that maybe there is too much of the fact that many of the leaders are not spending the money they should on the infrastructure of Iraq.
02:04If you look at parliamentary finances, there's been a 60 percent fall in the investment in local government,
02:10which means that basically schools and hospitals and the infrastructure in areas outside of Baghdad are sorely lacking in investment.
02:19That has gone down a lot since the last elections, whereas that money has been kept by the federal government in Baghdad,
02:26where they've been building bridges and better buildings in the city.
02:32And that has led to a breakdown, I think, in the trust, a greater breakdown in the trust between younger people and the ruling elites in Iraq.
02:41And there is another reason.
02:42And that is that young people are keen to get into politics, but they say they just can't get in,
02:47because it's sort of been overtaken by all these faces that they've seen for years who are constantly reelected and getting young people.
02:54There are only, for example, 75 independent candidates in this election compared to 7,740 candidates in all, a third of whom are women.
03:04The young people say, well, we can't make it because we don't have the money to be a candidate in the Iraqi elections.
03:08That's why we are disappointed with what's going on.
03:11Now, there are a couple of other major challenges.
03:13One of them is a balancing act between Iran on one side, the United States on the other,
03:19basically because there are many factions in Iraq which are sympathetic to the Iranian leadership,
03:26who are listening closely to Iraq and maybe less closely to the Iraqi government.
03:33And the Iraqi government is coming under pressure from the United States to deal with these armed groups, these factions.
03:40Now, some of these factions even have candidates who are running in the election today.
03:43So this is a major challenge for the upcoming new government in Iraq, which is going to have to address.
03:49There's also the change in what has been going on in the region with the demise of the influence of Iran,
03:55the war in Gaza, the change of leadership in Syria,
04:01plus all the involvement of, for example, Yemen in the war in Gaza as well, and also the situation in Lebanon.
04:08So all of the geopolitical situation around Iraq has changed quite a lot since 2021.
04:14There's something else that the new government is going to have to take on board.
04:17So there are a lot of changes that the new government is going to have to face.
04:21Well, we'll have to see how today's vote gets along.
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