Nothing changes for Iraq even after elections, people continue to wait for reforms
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Roshan Amiri
- . October 16, 2021
- . Update: October 16, 2021 6:46 pm
Iraq–Iraq has been hoping for a wave of change but to its loss and disappointment, it is nowhere to be seen despite the country going through an electoral practice recently.
With an overwhelming majority, it is the ruling party that has once again formed the government, which prohibits the idea of changing the political outlook of the country. The government has become more fragmented than ever after the election and that is resolution in negligence of actual demands of people.
There are many reasons why the country will continue to be in the stage it is right now despite various promises. One of the major reasons is the acceptance of people. Majority of the country’s population has already accepted the election results or the choice of leaders as their fate.
Even if they are not happy with the way the government has been functioning, they are hardly making efforts to speak up. If people really cared, they would have demanded for fair electoral practices and the turn out of the elections which were recently held, wouldn’t have been so low.
And the few people who speak up are easily silenced by the Iraqi forces. They are easy to handle because of being few in numbers but in turn if more people were to speak up, the situation would have been much better.
A testimony of this is a 2019 protest where the majority of the Iraqi population was seen on streets fighting against corruption, internal violence, unemployment and other such issues. But now, even half of them are not seen and that has essentially resulted in taking pressure off the centre.
Another reason why there is hardly any projected change in the country is because of the corrupt, same power greedy leaders sitting at the top. Take Muqtafa al-Sadr, who won the elections, belongs to the same old ruling class and is believed to follow the same mindset as his predecessor.
The election brought nothing new to the political structure of Iraq; rather the votes merely got twisted between the three big players. One of the most important things that needs to be addressed here is that there is negligible participation from the youth of the nation.
The young population of the nation has either accepted the situation or are fleeing the nation to get a better lifestyle. To say that they are wrong in doing so will be unfair on their part but what needs to be acknowledged is that they are leaving a generation behind them who will once again face the same things that they have. It is once a moral question for people to ponder upon.
No one can deny that all the fake promises were made by the leaders and the state of the country is all thanks to the corrupt practices that these leaders do sitting on top of the ladder. We have been blaming them for years and will continue to do the same but it’s high time that vene people start taking the responsibility.
Iraq had a tough history and that made people resistant to any major change but that will not help the future generations. If things continue to go the way they have been till now, the future generations are once who will be bearing the cost. The deeply penetrated fragmentation in the political sphere has made decision making even harder. If the youth does not speak up for what it wants, it will be a broken road for Iraq to pass.
