Baghdad: Iraq’s new president has asked veteran Shiite politician Adel Abdul-Mahdi to form a new government nearly five months after national elections were held, state TV reported late Tuesday.
Abdul-Mahdi is an independent who previously served as vice president, oil minister and finance minister, and is not part of either of the two Shiite-led blocs. Each of them claims to have the majority support after elections held on 12 May, in which no party won an outright majority.
He was previously a member of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, a large Shiite party with close ties to Iran.
The new president, Barham Salih is a Kurdish politician who was elected to the largely ceremonial role of president in a parliamentary vote earlier on Tuesday.
Under an unofficial agreement since the 2003 US-led invasion, Iraq’s is held by a Kurd, while the prime minister is Shiite and the parliament speaker is Sunni.
The prime minister-designate will have 30 days to submit his cabinet to parliament. State TV said Salih, of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, won 220 votes out of the 273 lawmakers who attended Tuesday’s session. He was among 20 candidates for the post, including one from the rival Kurdistan Democratic Party. The two parties have dominated Kurdish politics for decades.
Shiite lawmaker Hamid al-Moussawi said the lawmakers were supposed to vote on Monday, but delayed the session for nearly 24 hours after the KDP and the PUK were unable to agree on a candidate. The parliament speaker eventually decided to hold a vote among all 20 nominees.
The KDP’s nominee was Fuad Hussein, who served as chief of staff for the former Kurdish regional president Masoud Barzani.
Born in 1960 in the northern city of Sulaimaniyah, Salih joined the PUK in 1976 and later worked in its foreign relations department in London. He studied at Cardiff University and the University of Liverpool.
He held various posts in the Iraqi government after the 2003 invasion, including planning minister and deputy prime minister, and from 2009 to 2011 he served as prime minister of the Kurdish region.
Last year, he broke away from PUK following the death of the party’s founder, Jalal Talabani, a former Iraqi president. Salih formed an opposition party, but returned to the PUK to be its nominee for president.