Iraq votes in referendum on PM
Children watch as an Iraqi woman gives her ballot to a Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr's team member, whose team is collecting votes for candidates nominated to the prime minister position in an unofficial referendum in Baghdad's Shia suburb of Sadr City on Tuesday. Photo: AFP
The Iraqi political grouping of Shia cleric Moqtada Sadr is holding its own a referendum on who should be the country's prime minister.
The bloc Sadr belongs to came third in the election on 7 March. Whoever it backs stands a good chance of leading the next government.
None of the four alliances that won big parliamentary blocs in the vote can form a government on their own.
Since the vote there has been little progress towards forming a government.
The referendum is expected to run for two days.
"The political situation is complicated and [Moqtada Sadr] has always said that the best advisers are the Iraqi people," Hazem al-Araji, one of the movement's leaders, told the AFP newsagency.
The two biggest contenders, led by the incumbent Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, and the secular challenger Iyad Allawi, who came out narrowly ahead, are highly unlikely to work together.
That leaves the third-ranking bloc, the Iraqi National Coalition, which has 70 seats, as the king-makers. Moqtada Sadr's faction won 40 seats, the biggest share of that coalition's seats.
The referendum offers a choice of five candidates, all of them Shia Muslims - Maliki, Allawi, former PM Ibrahim Jaafari, Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi and Jaafar Sadr, the son of an assassinated ayatollah.
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