Polls close in Kurdish parliamentary election


READ MORE

Polls have closed in Kurdish parliamentary elections that were held a year after the semi-autonomous region’s failed bid for independence from Iraq.


Sunday’s election saw hundreds of candidates vying for the 111 seats in the regional parliament, including five allocated for Turkmen, five for Christians and one for Armenians.


More than 3.1 million people were eligible to vote in the semi-autonomous region.


With opposition parties weak, the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) are likely to extend their almost three decades of sharing power.


But the PUK said on Sunday it would not recognise the results, which hare expected within 72 hours, alleging fraud in the voting process. 


Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani of the KDP cast his vote shortly after polls opened on Sunday morning. 


“I hope the results of the vote are respected because it’s about the people’s choice for a new parliament and government,” local media quoted him as saying. 


Splits within the PUK present the possibility that KDP will take a dominant position in Kurdish  politics, both in the regional capital Erbil and in the difficult formation of a federal government in Baghdad.


Observers from two opposition parties have said that some people tried to use fake identification to vote but were stopped. 


Elections had been scheduled for late 2017, but were deferred in the aftermath of a referendum for independence which was met by a swift backlash from Baghdad.


With 92 percent of Iraqi Kurds voting in favour of independence, Iraq issued a strong response imposing economic penalties and taking over the oil-producing city of Kirkuk. 


Even though relations with Baghdad have since improved, the Kurdish  region has lost territory and economic autonomy following the independence bid, and voter frustration is rising.


Years of stagnant politics, unpaid salaries and corruption have undermined faith in politics and shrunk the turnout in recent election s.


Most major parties say they do not expect more than about 40 percent of the 3.85 million registered voters to go to the polls – below even the record low of 44.5 percent who voted in the federal election.


Article source: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary-lougheed-byelection-advance-polls-open-voting-1.4446604?cmp=rss


Best Wordpress Plugin development company in India     Best Web development company in India

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Canadian expected to be aboard Russia's 1st manned space mission since rocket failure

READ MORE The first manned mission to the International Space Station since a Russian rocket failed to launch successfully earlier this month may take off on Dec. 3, space agency Roscosmos said on Wednesday. And the crew is expected to include Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques, Agence France-Press reported. A Russian cosmonaut and U.S. astronaut were forced to abort their mission on Oct. 11 and perform an emergency landing after a launch accident that Roscomos said was caused by a faulty sensor. The accident was the first serious launch problem experienced by a manned Soyuz space mission since 1983, when a crew narrowly escaped before a launch pad explosion. Sergei Krikalyov, a senior Roscosmos official, was quoted by state news agency Tass as saying the next manned launch had been planned for mid-December, but that Russia was trying to bring the date forward so that the ISS is not briefly left without a crew. “The industry is making significant efforts to move the launch t...
Read more

Getting the dope on pot stocks is becoming easier as media groups invest in content: Don Pittis

Image
READ MORE “What’s the buzz? Tell me what’s happening,” goes the ’70s rock anthem. Part of the catchiness of the lyric — from the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar  — was that in that era the term “buzz” had developed a second spicy meaning. It described the high that people got from smoking cannabis. In the 1970s, the magazine High Times was a brand new title keeping an eye on the illegal but growing business of marijuana pricing and sales. It ran centrefolds of glistening pot plants and of an apartment filled to the windows with what the magazine insisted was an entire ton of cannabis. Now some of Canada’s most staid media voices are looking for ways to go toe to toe with High Times and its U.S. competitors, hoping to profit from Canada’s global head start in legal recreational cannabis. But when it comes to making a killing from spreading the buzz on the cannabis biz, to q...
Read more

Toronto man denies conspiring with Marvel CEO in alleged hate mail scheme

Image
READ MORE A Toronto man accused of conspiring with the head of Marvel Entertainment in a bizarre hate mail campaign against his wealthy former employer has denied any role in the alleged scheme. David Smith, along with Marvel CEO Isaac (Ike) Perlmutter, is the target of a slander lawsuit launched earlier this year by Canadian businessman Harold Peerenboom. Now Smith — a former employee of Peerenboom’s Toronto-based executive search firm, Mandrake Management — has filed a motion to dismiss the U.S. civil suit. It’s the latest development in the years-long legal battle between Peerenboom and Perlmutter, a notoriously reclusive American billionaire and personal friend of U.S. President Donald Trump. The hate mail campaign, which ran   between 2012 to 2015, saw anonymous letters falsely accusing Peerenboom of being a child molester, murderer and anti-Semite...
Read more