Baghdad, Iraq – A majority of Iraqis say their country is in dismal economic shape and getting worse, according to a new poll conducted by a conservative American think tank, with three in four respondents also describing security in the country as “poor.”
The numbers reveal a population with little optimism about the country’s economic future. They show Iraqis believe jobs are harder to find, electrical service is poorer, and corruption has increased sharply since last year.
And 62 percent of respondents said Iraq is more politically divided today than in the past.
The results were culled from 2,804 face-to-face interviews from across the country by the Washington-based International Republican Institute, or IRI.
The interviews were conducted by Iraqi pollsters and included responses from violence-ridden western Anbar province for the first time since IRI began regular opinion surveys in May 2004.
The latest poll was conducted between March 23 and March 31, a time of surging sectarian violence after the Feb. 22 bombing of a revered Shiite mosque in the city of Samara.
It also preceded a political breakthrough last week after a long deadlock that had prevented Iraq’s parties from forming a government.
The political stalemate sapped much of the optimism that followed the election in December of Iraq’s first full-term parliament since the fall of Sad dam Hussein in 2003.
Indeed, the poll shows a strong desire for a national unity government, with a majority of respondents demanding broad representation capable of dealing with the violent breakdown of relations between Iraq’s sectarian and ethnic communities.
More than half say they want the government in Baghdad to have “all political power and authority.”
But the poll suggests that any new Iraqi government faces a hard road in turning the souring mood around. Fifty-two percent think the country is moving in the wrong direction, the most since the IRI’s polls have been conducted, with just 30 percent saying it’s going in the right direction – the lowest percentage since the polling began.
Only a bare majority, 51 percent, believed life would be better or much better within the next five years, down sharply from the 85 percent who said so in April 2005.
