While Iraqi Kurdistan’s fierce 2014 election competition has subsided, power struggles and deal-making between the major parties are likely to continue in the months ahead. Preliminary results for the provincial councils indicate that the secular nationalist parties — the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Gorran movement — have won the majority of seats. Still, Islamic groups have emerged as a swing vote, particularly in contested localities and where traditional party alliances are dissipating. Capturing the Islamic vote may help secular parties temporarily consolidate power, but it also underlines the deeper challenges of institutionalizing a new power-sharing arrangement and managing the Iraqi Kurdistan’s rapid economic development and social changes.

In contrast with other regions where secularist and Islamist political agendas are generally in conflict, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq the secular nationalist parties are courting the Islamic vote. While quelling radical Islamic tendencies, the KDP and PUK have appeased Islamic parties by providing revenues, salaries and political positions to their leaders. Islamic parties such as the Kurdistan Islamic Union (KIU), Kurdistan Islamic Group (KIG, Komal) and even the once radicalized Kurdistan Islamic Movement (KIM) are part of the Iraqi Kurdistan parliament and the Kurdistan Alliance in Baghdad.

The Kurdish secular-Islamic nexus has become more complicated, however, since the rise of the Gorran movement in 2009 and weakening of the PUK. While remaining part of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), the Islamic parties have joined the opposition to demand political reform and an end to corruption. They also have benefited from the power struggles between the secular parties and breakdown of the KDP-PUK Strategic Agreement. In the effort to reconfigure the balance of power and form a new government, secular parties are courting Islamic groups. Although the new Kurdish parliament has yet to be formed after seven months, the KDP offered the KIU the Ministries of Labor and Social Affairs, Electricity, Parliamentary Affairs, Disputed Areas and the Head of the Department for Nongovernmental Affairs. Similarly, the newly appointed speaker of the Iraqi Kurdistan parliament from the Gorran list is an Islamist. 

Islamic parties also have become part of the competition for control of provincial councils, which have gained importance since they receive their own budgets from Baghdad and are responsible for economic development, service provision and appointing key posts, including the governor. Although the Islamic parties received about 15% of the overall vote in the 2014 provincial council elections and will likely secure no more than about eight seats in each of the three 30-to-32-member councils, they will play an important role in forming coalition administrations. Their swing vote will be necessary in Sulaimaniyah, where Gorran won 43% of the vote, and whose governorship remains contested by the PUK.