By Timour Azhari
BAGHDAD (Reuters) -Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has cast himself as the leader who can finally make the country a success after years of instability, and has moved against established parties that brought him to power as he seeks a second term.
Buoyed by signs of rising public support ahead of a November 11 parliamentary election, an increasingly confident Sudani is running against key members of a grouping of parties and armed groups that originally tapped him for
the job.
Campaigning on improving basic services and presenting himself as the man who can successfully balance ties with both Washington and Tehran, he says he expects to get the single-largest share of seats. Many analysts agree that Sudani, in power since 2022 and leader of the Construction and Development Coalition, is the frontrunner.
However, no party is able to form a government on its own in Iraq’s 329-member legislature, and so parties have to build alliances with other groups to become an administration, a fraught process that often takes many months.
Sudani, 55, has done many key jobs in Iraq's volatile political system and is the only post-2003 premier who never left the country, unlike others who went into exile and returned, often with new citizenships, after the U.S.-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.
He has the tricky task of balancing Iraq's unusual role as an ally of both Washington and Tehran, while trying to satisfy Iraqis desperate for jobs and services and protect himself in a world of cut-throat politics.
In 2024, allegations that staff in the premier's office had spied on senior officials caused uproar. A political adviser to Sudani denied the claims.
FATHER KILLED FOR POLITICAL ACTIVISM UNDER SADDAM
Born on March 4, 1970 in Baghdad to a family originally from rural southern Maysan province, Sudani worked as an agricultural supervisor under Saddam's government, even though his father and other relatives were killed for political activism.
Since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion he has been a mayor, a member of a provincial council, a regional governor, twice a cabinet minister and then prime minister.
"When we speak of someone who stayed in Iraq all these decades, it means they understand Iraqis as people and the Iraqi system," Sudani told Reuters in an interview in 2023.
But his resume is overshadowed by heavily-armed Iran-backed Shi'ite armed groups, including those that have fought U.S. forces, who have steadily expanded their reach in the state, politics and the economy.
For months in late 2023 and 2024, hardline Iranian-backed militias ignored Sudani's pleas to stop attacking U.S. forces in Iraq in protest at Israel's onslaught on Gaza, underscoring the limits of his political influence. The attacks disrupted a period of relative stability since Sudani took power under a deal that ended a year-long political deadlock. The attacks only stopped when Iran stepped in to rein the groups in.
STATE WANTS TO BRING WEAPONS UNDER CONTROL
Iraq is navigating a politically sensitive effort to disarm the country's Iran-backed militias amid pressure from the U.S., while at the same time negotiating with Washington to implement an agreement on a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops.
But Sudani told Reuters ahead of next week's vote that any effort to bring all weapons under state control would not work as long as there is a U.S.-led coalition in the country that some Iraqi factions view as an occupying force.
After the U.S. ousted Saddam, a Sunni Muslim, Shi'ites who had been oppressed under his rule and had sought refuge in Iran became the dominant political force in the oil-producing country via a new sectarian power-sharing system. The minority Sunnis were sidelined.
Sudani was nominated as prime minister by the Coordination Framework, the largest parliamentary coalition that is comprised of Shi'ite factions - some moderate, some hardline, all with good relationships with Iran.
In 2022, he replaced Mustafa al-Kadhimi, an ally of the West who came to power after anti-government protesters took to the streets in their thousands in 2019, demanding jobs and the departure of Iraq's ruling elite.
Protesters accuse the post-invasion political class of corruption and misrule that provoked insurgencies and sectarian civil wars and drove Iraq into dysfunction and economic trouble.
Baghdad-based diplomats describe Sudani as having reformist intentions but say he must work hard to show he is not another politician seeking a share of Iraq's oil wealth.
He promised to reform neglected sectors like the financial system by revamping graft-prone state banks and promoting digital payments, and to raise electricity production to end perennial power cuts.
But he has also sought to buy social stability with oil revenues by hiring hundreds of thousands of workers for the bloated public sector while passing Iraq's largest ever budget.
These moves -- including building roads, bridges and housing in a country that has seen little development for decades -- have made him popular with average Iraqis, but they are seen as unsustainable by financial watchdogs.
EMPOWERING ARMED GROUPS
Meanwhile, critics say his government has empowered some of the most hardline pro-Iran factions by hiring tens of thousands of people and creating a state company run by some of those factions with powers to obtain state contracts in many sectors.
Sudani's government has also been accused by rights groups of acting to limit freedom of expression while doing little to promote accountability for corruption. Sudani's government denies limiting free expression and says he has returned large sums of stolen funds.
Some analysts say Sudani would need to break free from many of the parties that brought him to power to bring about deep change, with the upcoming elections the main avenue to doing so.
"I think he is gaining more support from the people. He is seen as a good kind of visionary leader, but is limited by his political surroundings," said Hayder al-Shakeri of Chatham House.
(Reporting by Timour Azhari; writing by Michael Georgy; editing by Mark Heinrich)
