"Every time a new government is announced in Iraq, some imagine that the political system has passed its moment of peril, and the facts suggest that what often happens is only a temporary redistribution of the weights within an already crisis structure." In the Iraqi context, the Government does not represent the peak of stability, but rather a political truce in which conflicts are postponed rather than resolved, and contradictions are managed under the pressure of the need for consensus rather than under the logic of reform.
The major parties rely on highly centralized hierarchical structures, where legitimacy is reduced to the person of the leader, decision is reduced to his will, and internal disagreements are managed by the balance of loyalty rather than by clear institutional mechanisms. "This pattern, while providing a restraint in the ascendancy stages, does carry within it the causes of disintegration, since the party has no natural mechanism to renew its leadership or reproduce its legitimacy." With the leader's role diminished by political loss or aging, the party is shifting from a cohesive entity to a fragile structure waiting for the moment of emptiness.
At that moment, division is not so much motivated by intellectual difference as by survival. Secondary leaders, which used to be in the orbit of the center, start looking for alternative paths that preserve their presence and influence, and turn towards youth parties or emerging political projects, not because they necessarily carry a different vision, but because they represent a new opportunity for political life. Here, the landscape is not a healthy democratic transition, but a recycling of old elites with new names and rhetoric, while structural dysfunction remains.
Parallel to this fragile partisan scene, the presence of the supreme religious authority, represented by Sayyid Ali al-Sistani (May God Survive Him), has remained an unwritten moral restraint on the political process. The Marjiya was not a party to the ruling, but it did draw public ceilings that limited politicians' rush towards their maximum options, prevented a descent into total chaos at critical moments, and maintained a separation between fatwa and daily political practice.
But politics is not always managed by the premise. Talking about the absence of reference is neither a wish nor an exaggeration, but rather a reading of a natural timeline that cannot be ignored. In the event of such an absence, its impact will go beyond the religious dimension to the depth of the political and social scene, where the regime loses one of its most important moral controls, and a number of actors are freed from the moral embarrassment that has been restraining their choices or delaying their push towards more acute or reformist positions.
The transformation, in this case, would not be a single event or an immediate explosion, but a series of cumulative transformations. Deeper divisions will emerge within traditional parties, rivalries within the same house will escalate before spreading beyond it, and religious and social identity will be called into the heart of political conflict more clearly. In contrast, young forces will face a real test: either turn into a lever for actual renewal, or invest as a new front for old unresolved conflicts.
Iraq, at this stage, is not on the brink of collapse as much as it is on a mobile ground, where stability based on people and symbols is eroding, without institutional alternatives capable of carrying the next stage being built. With the decline of historical leaders and the possibility of the absence of universal moral controls, politics will move from managing balances to a struggle over the definition of legitimacy itself: Who has the right to represent? And who sets the red lines? And who speaks for the community?
The shift is coming, whether I consciously manage or leave to random interactions. The question is no longer whether the system will change, but how this change will be managed, at what political and social cost, and who will be willing to read it before it imposes itself as an insurmountable reality.
comments