The draft law on elections to the Council of Representatives was approved by the Council of Ministers on the date of the 12th November 2019 and submitted to the Council of Representatives. Another project had been prepared by the Presidency of the Republic but had been neglected after the submission of the Council of Minister’s draft. The draft law was discussed and amended by the House of Representatives and voted on 24th December 2019. The demarcation of the electoral districts was postponed to an annex to be prepared and subsequently voted on. The annex was already voted on 24th October 2020. The full law was promulgated in Iraqi Chronicle No. 4603 on 9th November 2020, a full year after the draft law was submitted by the Council of Ministers.
The draft law was introduced by the Council of Ministers in the midst of the demonstrations that engulfed Iraq in the autumn of 2019 and was one of the Government’s most visible responses to the demands of the demonstrators, who tried urgently to stop or mitigate it; Like its decisions on employment in the public sector, the hasty response to the street in politically troubled situations did not favor the general strategy of the State in either the electoral system or economic policy, However, the requirement of the electoral law in these circumstances was, as the Hawza indicated in the speech of 15th November 2019: “the electoral law was required to speed up the adoption of a fair electoral law that would restore citizens’ confidence in the electoral process and would not be biased towards political parties and currents and offers a real opportunity to change the forces that have ruled the country over the past years if the people want to change them and replace them with new faces. The passage of a law that does not give such an opportunity to voters would be unacceptable and useless. “
