In every election season in Iraq, streets across the country, not only in the capital, Baghdad, are flooded with campaign posters and slogans.
Old and new faces stare down from walls and billboards, with well-known ones dominating the view and newcomers, with their smaller posters and fewer images, seeming to struggle for space in an already fierce competition.
The same promises echo over and over again, such as fighting corruption, improving services, and reconstruction.
But something deep within the Iraqis themselves has changed. They no longer believe what they hear. Instead, they exchange jokes about “candidates who change their slogans faster than neighbourhood generators.”
Twenty years after the country’s first free and fair elections, Iraq’s democracy resembles a living body with no pulse or a system that exists without having a soul.
When the first polling stations opened in 2005, the scene resembled a kind of national dream. Millions of people went out to vote despite threats, car bombs, and roadside bombs, holding up their ink-stained fingers as a symbol of a new dawn.
Today, the scene is starkly different: silence outweighs the cheering, and absence outnumbers participation.
Official figures say voter turnout ranged between 40 and 41 per cent in the last two elections, but independent observers estimate the real figure to be no more than 20 to 25 per cent.
People no longer see the ballot box as salvation, but as a mirror reflecting their accumulated disappointments.
Each general election sees a flood of unimaginable spending, with millions of dollars poured into lavish campaigns, feasts, and television ads, while village schools continue to have no roofs and hospitals lack medicine.
Political parties own satellite channels that compete in displays of power rather than in presenting ideas.
As a result, elections in Iraq have become an open marketplace for buying loyalties more than a genuine arena for political competition.
One young first-time candidate known for his integrity and his fight against sectarianism explained that “we don’t compete with ideas; we compete with money. If you don’t have money, you’re invisible; if you’re invisible, you don’t get elected.”
Another competent candidate known for her two decades of work empowering youth, especially young women, said that political money leaves no room for those without it even to approach the major tribes.
She herself belongs to a well-known tribe, but she nevertheless asked resignedly “what can one tribe really do alone?”
Sectarian language has also not disappeared, and it has only changed its clothes. In the past, the parties used to shout about sects and ethnicity. Today, they whisper about “identity,” “rights,” and “defending the constituency.”
The essence is the same: dividing Iraqis into opposing groups, each fearing the other more than it fears corruption.
In the country’s cities, the glow of overtly religious rhetoric has faded, yet it still lingers in the media, pulpits, and symbols. Every time the crises in the country deepen, the sectarian voice returns, reminding people that the threat is not poverty or unemployment but “the different other.”
The Tishreen (October) generation that filled the streets with protesters in 2019-2020 demanding a homeland free of quotas and power-sharing between the country’s different groups now finds itself facing the same reality it once rejected.
Many have chosen to boycott the elections as a silent act of protest. Inas Mohamed, one of the Tishreen protesters, said that “we have tried voting and tried boycotting, yet nothing has changed. Maybe the problem isn’t us, but the system itself.”
She added that she had earlier thought about running in the elections herself but had been too ashamed after seeing how MPs who had risen to power in the last elections under the banner of Tishreen had quickly broken every promise they had made to young people and joined the major blocs instead.
Political analyst Aqil Abbas believes that boycotts do not work in Iraq because the “boycotters have no political programme, and even a low turnout still grants legitimacy to the winners.”
Abbas Mohamed, who boycotted the last elections, said that “my boycott of the elections didn’t fight corruption or the power-sharing system. So, this time around I’ll vote for whoever I think deserves it. But not for anyone who is currently in office.”
While the country’s political parties and blocs insist that “those who don’t vote have no right to complain,” many Iraqis see boycotting the elections as a political act and the only peaceful means of protest left to them.
Mohamed Hassan, a retiree, said that “my vote didn’t make a difference in three elections. Why repeat the same experience? Boycotting isn’t about withdrawal from the homeland – it’s about withdrawal from a play whose ending we never get to see.”
However, despite this awareness, boycotters face organised smear campaigns branding them as “irresponsible and unpatriotic.” But many of them have not lost their love for Iraq but only for the system that claims to represent it. Thus, their electoral silence becomes a muffled scream of protest, one unheard at the ballot boxes but clearly expressing the wishes of a people who want change that is not made of promises alone.
Political analysts in Iraq repeat the painful truth that says that every general election in the country reproduces sectarian power sharing, not just as a political arrangement but as a governing creed.
Ministries are divided by affiliation, not competence, and loyalty is rewarded with office. This entrenches a “democracy of quotas or power sharing,” in which people vote for representatives of their sect, ethnicity, or tribe and not for a unifying national vision.
An academic working in Baghdad put it succinctly when he said that “Iraq has turned from a state of citizens into a state of factions. Democracy has lost its meaning because it wasn’t built on a social contract but on a deal of interests.”
However, the picture is not entirely bleak. A new generation of independent activists, bloggers, journalists, and university students is creating alternative spaces for dialogue and accountability.
Such people do not believe in the sanctity of the ballot box, but they do believe in the power of words, awareness, and public scrutiny. They may not yet be electoral force, but they represent the seeds of a different consciousness and a growing refusal to accept political and sectarian inheritance as destiny.
After 20 years of democracy in Iraq, the country’s electoral system has not so much failed as has been hijacked. It has become a façade concealing shadowy powers and a form of legitimacy masking the absence of justice.
But despite the exhaustion and disillusionment, Iraqis still cling to a fragile thread of hope that one day a true democracy will be born in their country, one that is not built on fear or run by money but grounded in human dignity and the right to be a true citizen of the country and not just a member of a group.
Until that day, one question remains open: can life be breathed again into a democracy that has been drained by voting and seemingly extinguished by corruption?
* A version of this article appears in print in the 16 October, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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