From rooftops to lampposts, campaign posters compete for every inch of Baghdad’s streets. There are pictures of politicians wearing hard hats and slogans vowing “strength and prosperity.”
Concrete walls that once shielded buildings from car bombs now protect glitzy new apartment developments, promising cafes, gyms and spas.
After a long U.S. occupation, years of sectarian bloodshed and a jihadist insurgency, Iraq has become an improbable haven of calm in the Middle East, at least relative to many other parts of the region. Safeguarding this hard-won peace is a top priority for Iraqis as parliamentary elections get underway on Tuesday.
“The Iraqi people have reached a point where they can no longer tolerate conflict and wars and all these misadventures,” Mohammed al-Sudani, the prime minister, told The New York Times in an interview last week. “People want stability, security and development.”
More than 7,700 candidates from 114 party lists are competing for 329 seats. Once the results are in, there will be weeks, and possibly months, of negotiating for parties to forge a coalition with the largest share of seats, and then form a government.
Mr. al-Sudani, often credited for Iraq’s stability and a construction boom, heads an alliance of parties expected to win the most votes. But some of his former political allies have vowed to prevent him from forming a ruling coalition to gain a second term.
And just below the surface of this election lurks the thorny question of whether and how Iraq can curb the considerable influence of its once powerful neighbor, Iran.
The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 toppled the longtime dictator Saddam Hussein and ended government control by the country’s Sunni Muslim minority. Since then, Iraqi politics have been dominated by the Shiite Muslim majority.
Iraq has been stuck ever since in a tug of war between Washington and Tehran, the regional Shiite power.
In recent years, an array of powerful Iran-linked militias have been gaining political influence in Iraq.
These mostly Shiite groups were created in 2014 as part of the so-called Popular Mobilization Forces to fight the Islamic State, or ISIS, the jihadist Sunni force that seized large parts of the country and brutally targeted Iraqi Shiites. Some obtained military and financial backing from Iran.
The threat of ISIS has faded, but the Iran-backed militias have grown more powerful. Their leaders argue they have the right to retain weapons as long as U.S. forces remain in Iraq. And they have pushed Iraqi officials hard to expel American troops.
Mr. al-Sudani secured a commitment for a phased withdrawal of the roughly 1,300 U.S. forces still in Iraq by September 2026. But U.S. officials are already negotiating to maintain a presence in the country, saying it is needed to fight Islamic State remnants.
