Alwaght- In past few months, the Iraqi Kurdistan region has been severely in a crisis over its presidency. In the past weeks after failing to decide on the region’s president post, the crisis has went intensified and violent.The political parties’ parliamentary agreements reached in 2013 which led into extension of Masoud Barzani’s presidency term for more two years expired on August 19, 2015. In the days leading to the term deadline date serious discords erupted between the Iraq’s Kurdistan Democratic Party and other four region’s parties over shifting the region’s political mechanism to parliamentary system and extension of Barzani’s term in office.
Holding regular daily meetings without any tangible and positive outcome for several weeks beside a critical financial crisis and delayed paying of the state employees and other citizen workers' salaries have made people in the Kurdish region lose their patience. All these factors have triggered popular demonstrations the results of which were domestic violence and attacking the Democratic Party’s offices across Kurdistan. Violent clashes claimed lives of 5 and injured 147 civilians. The ministers from the Gorran were also removed from the coalition government by the region’s Prime Minister, Nechervan Barzani , as the region’s parliament speaker was barred from entering Erbil, the capital city of the Kurdish region.
This analysis aims to examine the objectives the two major players, Kurdistan Democratic Party and Gorran Party, are seeking in the current Kurdistan crisis.
Kurdistan Democratic Party's goals
Through the president’s post, budget, changing the region’s political system and writing new constitution the Kurdistan Democratic Party is after a set of objectives which include:
1. Keeping its dominant position and upper hand in the Kurdistan region’s governing: Currently, the Party is the largest Kurdish region’s parliamentary fraction by occupying 38 out of 111 seats in the regional parliament. It also has the president and the prime minister posts, as it is in full control of the budget as well as the financial resources. In the process of the recent crisis, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Barzanis have struggled to keep the status quo at most, and at least preserve the president and prime minister’s posts in their hold. Therefore, they naturally oppose any change of the region’s political mechanism to a parliamentary system and decrease of president' executive powers in the region's constitution.
2. Undermining the opponents’ base and stances: Amid the recent Kurdish region’s crisis, the Kurdistan Democratic Party has been working hard to substantiate its credibility and weaken its opponents’ positions. The most important ways adopted by the party to reach this goal include painting the popular protests as uncivil, calling the demonstrations as proxy ones, describing the protest waves as illegal, focusing on the roles of the Kurdistan Workers Party( PKK) and Gorran Party as the main triggers of violence of the demonstrations and using practical steps like dismissing the ministers, threatening to sink the government and struggling to remove the current parliament’s speaker, Mohammed Yousef, who leans towards the opponent party, Gorran.
3. Trying to attract votes and draw public opinions’ support for the upcoming elections: The Democratic Party is making efforts to play as an oppressed and a victim in the recent violent events. The media bound to the Kurdistan Democratic Party are trying to show the events in a way in which Masoud Barzani and his proponents are painted as patriotic and well-wishers, while at the same time their opponent, the Gorran Party, is shown as treasonous and a puppet of the foreign powers. Their main objective is to damage the Gorran Party’s public figure, and convince people and sell the idea that Kurdistan Democratic Party is popular and it could be best choice for the Kurdistan region’s people.
4. Showing seriousness and determination in the face of opponents’ plots and threats: One of the goals sought by Barzani at the recent developments is making the other parties to understand that Democratic Party is highly sensitive about any opposition or provocation of pubic opinions against it, and would not hesitate in responding to such measures, even if it had to resort to cabinet dissolution and preventing the other parties from entering its areas of control.
