him from becoming prime minister.
In an interview with the BBC Tuesday, Allawi said it was “very clear” the Islamic Republic was trying to block him from the office.
“Iran is interfering quite heavily and this is worrying,” Allawi said.
He said Tehran had interfered by inviting all the major parties—except his own Iraqiyya bloc—to come to Tehran for talks. “They have invited everybody—but they haven’t invited us,” he said.
He said he was also concerned that Iran was influencing the commission empowered to disqualify candidates linked to the Saddam Hussein regime to strike some of his Iraqiyya bloc members from the list of those elected. If only three of his parliamentarians are stricken, Allawi will lose his plurality. Allawi is a Shia, but he won major support in Sunni areas by running on a secular platform as well as by attacking Iran for interfering perpetually in Iraqi domestic affairs.
With 325 seats in the new parliament, Iraqiyya is the largest bloc with 91 seats, just barely ahead of the 89 seats won by Prime Minister Nuri Al-Maliki’s State of Law party.
In third place with 70 seats is the Iraqi National Alliance, a consortium of two parties seen as close to Tehran—the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council led by the Hakim family and the radical followers of Muqtada As-Sadr, who now lives in Qom—plus the followers of Ahmad Chalabi, once the Pentagon’s favorite Iraqi but now condemned widely in the United States. This coalition won a majority in only three Shia provinces in the South.
In fourth place is the Kurdistan Alliance, which easily took the three Kurdish majority provinces in the north.
Finally, 32 independents were elected.
Simple math shows there is no easy majority. Allawi’s party plus the Kurds falls 29 seats short of a majority, which would require that Allawi pick up almost all of the independents to become prime minister.
A Shiite coalition of Mal-iki’s party plus the Hakim-Sadr-Chalabi party comes up four seats short. That combination would probably have the best chance of picking up enough independents to form a majority.
