SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region — The Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) marked the 42nd anniversary of its foundation on Thursday amid further fragmentation of the party’s structure and intensified political feuds among its rivalling factions.
The party leadership decided to mark the anniversary somberly this year out of respect for the death of Nawshirwan Mustafa, a founding member of the party who in late 2000’s organised one of the most illustrious popular resistance movements against both the PUK and its then strategic ally the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).
Mustafa unofficially left the PUK in 2006 after a failed attempt to reform the party that has over the past decades defined itself as a social democratic force in the highly conservative Kurdish political climate.
He soon founded the Change Movement, or Gorran in Kurdish, after former US President Barack Obama’s 2009 election slogan ‘change is coming,’ throwing the PUK into a relatively long and painful period of disarray and regrouping.
Soon the breakaway group grew larger than its parent party and in the 2013 elections Gorran secured six more seats in the regional parliament than the PUK, which only received 18 of the 111-seat national assembly.
Perhaps the greatest blow to the PUK as a leading political force in the Kurdistan Region came when its founding father Jalal Talabani, not quite unexpectedly, fell ill after a brain stroke in 2012.
Talabani, affectionately called Mam Jalal (Uncle Jalal), 83, was still serving, quite comfortably, his second term as the president of the new Iraq when he was hospitalised, and ever since the overthrow of the former regime in Iraq, he effectively relinquished any real interest in the political life of the Kurdistan Region.
Many accused Mam Jalal in the years before his stroke of being more impressed by the glamorous position of the Iraqi president in Baghdad than the bitter bickering at home in Erbil, where the growing influence of the KDP had become too vast and penetrating to oppose.
In fact, when President Obama, in mid-2010, asked Talabani, as a personal request, to give up his post as Iraq’s president, largely to alleviate a rigid political gridlock in the Iraqi parliament, Mam Jalal did not hesitate to rebuff the request during a phone conversation with the then unexperienced US president.
“What an audacity to ask me for such favours,” Mam Jalal has been quoted to have said after finishing the conversation.
The PUK now has two ongoing pacts with two opposing parties. It has a strategic alliance with the KDP to continue the status quo in the Kurdistan Region and preserve its seemingly inadequate political and economic institutions. Simultaneously, it has a controversial pact with Gorran to dismantle the same status quo and unravel existing political and economic institutions.
It has supported the KDP in its bid for an independence referendum. It has also supported Gorran’s refusal to reopen the parliament that the KDP shut down in 2015 after sour disagreements with Gorran.
The party will go to polls in both Iraq and the Kurdistan Region within the next six to eight months and any hope of a larger victory than the last election for the PUK seems to depend on how it can reconcile these contradictions within the party.
The party leadership decided to mark the anniversary somberly this year out of respect for the death of Nawshirwan Mustafa, a founding member of the party who in late 2000’s organised one of the most illustrious popular resistance movements against both the PUK and its then strategic ally the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP).
Mustafa unofficially left the PUK in 2006 after a failed attempt to reform the party that has over the past decades defined itself as a social democratic force in the highly conservative Kurdish political climate.
He soon founded the Change Movement, or Gorran in Kurdish, after former US President Barack Obama’s 2009 election slogan ‘change is coming,’ throwing the PUK into a relatively long and painful period of disarray and regrouping.
Soon the breakaway group grew larger than its parent party and in the 2013 elections Gorran secured six more seats in the regional parliament than the PUK, which only received 18 of the 111-seat national assembly.
Perhaps the greatest blow to the PUK as a leading political force in the Kurdistan Region came when its founding father Jalal Talabani, not quite unexpectedly, fell ill after a brain stroke in 2012.
Talabani, affectionately called Mam Jalal (Uncle Jalal), 83, was still serving, quite comfortably, his second term as the president of the new Iraq when he was hospitalised, and ever since the overthrow of the former regime in Iraq, he effectively relinquished any real interest in the political life of the Kurdistan Region.
Many accused Mam Jalal in the years before his stroke of being more impressed by the glamorous position of the Iraqi president in Baghdad than the bitter bickering at home in Erbil, where the growing influence of the KDP had become too vast and penetrating to oppose.
In fact, when President Obama, in mid-2010, asked Talabani, as a personal request, to give up his post as Iraq’s president, largely to alleviate a rigid political gridlock in the Iraqi parliament, Mam Jalal did not hesitate to rebuff the request during a phone conversation with the then unexperienced US president.
“What an audacity to ask me for such favours,” Mam Jalal has been quoted to have said after finishing the conversation.
The PUK now has two ongoing pacts with two opposing parties. It has a strategic alliance with the KDP to continue the status quo in the Kurdistan Region and preserve its seemingly inadequate political and economic institutions. Simultaneously, it has a controversial pact with Gorran to dismantle the same status quo and unravel existing political and economic institutions.
It has supported the KDP in its bid for an independence referendum. It has also supported Gorran’s refusal to reopen the parliament that the KDP shut down in 2015 after sour disagreements with Gorran.
The party will go to polls in both Iraq and the Kurdistan Region within the next six to eight months and any hope of a larger victory than the last election for the PUK seems to depend on how it can reconcile these contradictions within the party.
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