Global Policy Forum

By John F. Burns and James Glanz

A broad Shiite alliance led by two Iran-backed religious parties won a slim majority of seats in the national assembly, final election results showed Sunday. The alliance's victory - in the first fully elected parliament in Iraq's 85-year history as a separate state - was narrower than the alliance had projected and set the stage for protracted maneuvering.

The 8.5 million people who voted, a turnout of 58 percent, appeared to have spread their choices widely enough to assure that power in the new government, and in the drafting of a new constitution, will have to be broadly shared among the assembly's 275 members, lessening the possibility that a religious Shiite theocracy could emerge from the elections. Calculations based on voting results indicated that while the Shiite alliance had won about 48 percent of the popular vote, it would hold 140 seats, or 2 more than required for a majority.

Until just before results were announced, alliance officials said they were expecting 150 seats. That number would have brought them closer to the two-thirds majority required to name a new government and to take the controlling hand in writing a constitution. Instead, heavy Kurdish voting in the north and secular voting in Baghdad and Basra offset the alliance's sweep in most of the southern provinces.

About 75 seats in the new assembly appeared headed for an alliance of Iraq's two main Kurdish parties, which dominated the votes of Iraq's heavily mountainous far north. A party led by Ayad Allawi, a secular Shiite who has been interim prime minister, seemed likely to take 40 seats, the largest bloc controlled by any individual leader. Five seats appeared likely to go to Sheik Ghazi al-Yawar, the interim president, one of a handful of Sunni leaders who did not boycott the elections, and the only Sunni figure of national standing who appeared to have secured a place in the assembly.

The remaining 15 seats will be scattered among eight other parties. Three seats seemed likely to go to a group loyal to Moktada al-Sadr, the volatile Shiite cleric who has twice led uprisings against American troops, and another three seats to a Turkman party. Two seats each seemed likely to be taken by a vestige of Iraq's old Communist party and by two moderate Islamic splinter parties, one Kurdish and the other Shiite. Three other seats, unofficial calculations show, will go to individuals, one of them an Assyrian Christian, one a former American-appointed governor of Nineveh Province and one the leader of a small party called the National Democratic Alliance.

The sweeping victory sought by the main Shiite group, the United Iraqi Alliance, was denied when the group's early lead in returns from Baghdad and the southern provinces shrunk before the heavy Kurdish voting in the north, and the secular vote in big cities for Dr. Allawi. Dr. Allawi took nearly 615,000 votes, more than half his total, in Baghdad and Basra. But the crosscurrents of Iraqi politics were illustrated by the Shiite alliance's still greater success in Baghdad, the country's most cosmopolitan city, where it took 60 percent of the 1.9 million votes, many of them in the sprawling Shiite slum of Sadr City.

Needing about 44 more seats to reach a two-thirds majority in the assembly, the Shiite alliance signaled Sunday that it was ready to lead a coalition government of Shiites, Kurds and Sunnis, some of whom could be drawn into the cabinet even if they have no seats in the assembly. Some alliance leaders even hinted at a national unity government that would include figures like Dr. Allawi, hitherto considered an apostate by some of the alliance's leaders because of his willingness to appoint veterans of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party to senior posts in sensitive ministries like defense, interior and intelligence.

If the alliance's pledge to work with rivals survives the bargaining ahead, it will be a fresh lift for American officials here, who have been working since the Jan. 30 elections to encourage what one senior American diplomat described as the "integrating, rather than the disintegrating," forces in Iraqi politics.

In an interview as the last election returns were being tallied, the diplomat said the Americans were "ready to work with whatever government the Iraqis choose," and were not worried about the alliance's Iranian links. "I think that they're nationalistic Iraqis, and that they didn't go through all those years of struggle against Saddam just to hand their country over to the Iranians."

At its news conference on Sunday, the election commission's officials announced the results of a two-week count that relied on painstaking cross-checking of paper tallies from 5,300 polling stations. They said that with a pool of 14.7 million eligible voters, the country had a turnout exceeding their election-day estimate of 8 million by nearly 500,000 votes. They noted it had been achieved in the face of threats from insurgent leaders to "wash the streets" with the blood of voters, and despite intensive attacks on polling stations and voters across the country. But the results released Sunday showed that the success in getting out the vote was patchy, at least politically, with province-by-province breakdowns demonstrating that those who voted were overwhelmingly Shiites and Kurds, with Sunnis, the Iraqi minority that traditional held power, largely boycotting the polls.

The sparse participation in four Sunni-majority provinces with nearly seven million Iraqis, a fourth of the country's population, augured poorly for hopes that a significant number of Sunnis might now move toward disavowing the insurgency. Turnouts in the mainly Sunni provinces were as low as 2 percent in Anbar, west of Baghdad, and 17 percent in Nineveh, in the north, where the majority of the votes appeared to have been cast by local minorities of Shiites and Kurds.

In Salahaddin, Mr. Hussein's home province, with a substantial Shiite minority, the turnout was 29 percent; in Diyala Province, with a population about one-third Shiite, it was 33 percent. By comparison, the turnout in the three mainly Kurdish provinces in the north averaged 85 percent; in nine mainly Shiite southern provinces, the average was 71 percent. The highest voting in any of the regions that have been critically affected by the insurgency was in Baghdad, a city blanketed by American and Iraqi troops on election day as 51 percent of eligible voters went to the polls.

Concerns about the continuing threat posed by the insurgency were briefly set aside Sunday for celebrations by the Shiites and Kurds, who hailed the vote as a critical step in securing freedoms denied them during decades of Sunni domination. More broadly, the elections' organizers hailed the results as historic not only for Iraq but for the Arab world, where elections have generally been stage-managed to assure the continuity of autocratic regimes.

"Today, Iraq is taking a new step toward the horizon of democracy, a very wide horizon, a step in which the Iraqi people are giving an example for the first time of a true Arab democratic experience," said Fareed Ayar, a spokesman for the election commission, a 59-year-old Kurd from the northern city of Sulaimaniya. He described those who voted as having "closed all the wounds" of Iraq's past, as well as giving their own rebuke to the insurgents. "They went to the polls standing tall," he said.

A similar note was sounded by Shiite leaders. "This is the first experience of democracy in our country, and it has been a success," said Haitham al-Husseini, a senior leader in the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, a principal member of the Shiite alliance. "We need a government that will save the country."

In the north, Kurdish leaders were triumphant, although they continued to insist that as many as 300,000 Kurds may have been disenfranchised by election miscues, including polling stations that never opened or ran out of ballots. "It was a big success for the entire people of Iraq and for the people of Kurdistan in particular," Massoud Barzani, one of the top two Kurdish leaders, said in an interview in the snow-covered mountain town of Salahuddin, where he appeared in a red-and-white turban and a pale green smock. "It shows the size of the Kurds in Iraq. It also shows that the Kurds can play a major role in the building of a new Iraq that is federal, democratic and pluralistic."

In reaching the official allocation of assembly seats, the election commission will use a complex system of proportional representation that will eliminate all parties that fall short of a threshold - about 30,750 votes - required to elect a single member to the assembly. The remaining parties will then get a slightly higher proportion of seats they won in the popular vote. It was this provision that appeared to have assured the Shiite alliance its assembly majority, although it fell short of a majority of the votes.

The Shiite coalition, backed by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric, won 48 percent of the vote, against 26 percent for the Kurdistan Alliance, a partnership between Mr. Barzani's Kurdish Democratic Party and a rival Kurdish group, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, which has said it will push its president, Jalal Talabani, for the post of president in the new government.

Dr. Allawi's party, the Iraqi List, won 14 percent. The remaining 12 percent was scattered among 108 other parties and alliances, none with more than 1.8 percent, the tally posted by Sheik Yawar's group, the Iraqis Party.

The official allocations in the assembly will be made after a three-day period beginning Monday during which the election commission will hear protests on the voting tallies, then issue a final seat breakdown. That process could last a week or more, and could be followed by more weeks of political horse-trading before the parties put together the two-thirds majority needed to name the new government, beginning with the appointment of a presidency council comprising a president and two vice presidents. In turn, the council will name a prime minister and a cabinet, who will need confirmation by a simple majority in the assembly.

Privately, American officials have said they hope to see a new government take office by the end of March, although that date could slip in the absence of any deadline for an agreement among the parties. The assembly is likely to meet much earlier, possibly late this month or early in March. Apart from naming the new government, the assembly's main task is the drafting of a new constitution, which must be submitted to a national referendum by Oct. 15, with another election by Dec. 15 to choose an assembly and government to serve for five years.

Edward Wong contributed reporting from Salahuddin for this article.