The Iraqi parliament set Monday for November 6 the next elections to the provincial councils, a first in ten years for these bodies which had been dissolved in the wake of the 2019 anti- power protest movement .

“ The provincial elections will take place on November 6, 2023 ”, decided the deputies on the night of Sunday to Monday, according to a press release from the media service of Parliament.

These elections will run in 15 of the 18 Iraqi provinces, the three provinces of the autonomous region of Iraqi Kurdistan (north) not being concerned. In a federal Iraq, the provincial councils have relatively significant power. They allocate budgets in the health, transport or education sectors.

The November 6 election will be the first of its kind since 2013. At the time, the lists of then Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki came out on top. The next provincial elections should have taken place in 2018, but were postponed. And, a year later, when a vast and unprecedented anti-power movement shook Iraq, the protesters had demanded and obtained the dissolution of the provincial councils. Because part of the opposition and civil society sees these councils as breeding grounds for corruption.

These entities, created by the 2005 Constitution after the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime, “ open the door wide to corruption. We refuse to have them reinstated ,” independent MP Alaa al-Rikabi, who came out of the 2019 protest movement, told AFP.