BAGHDAD — Iraq’s political factions reached a tentative agreement Thursday on a contested law to organize parliamentary elections next year, potentially pulling the country back from crisis and avoiding another veto that could have delayed the vote for months.
Politicians were still being briefed on the agreement Thursday night, and no official announcement had been made. If it holds, the deal would offer to another example of what has become politics as usual in Iraq: A mounting crisis threatens to cast the country into further ethnic and sectarian strife, before a closed-door solution is reached at what appears to be the last minute.
While security has improved markedly in the past year, the latest political crisis had led to Sunni Arab and even Kurdish calls for a boycott of the election. The Sunni threats were reminiscent of 2005, when the community largely stayed away from voting — a decision many see as having set the stage for brutal internecine strife in 2006 and 2007.
Even with the tentative agreement, which must now be approved by the Iraqi electoral commission, election officials said it would be almost impossible to hold the election in January as originally planned. Mid- to late February was more likely, since a major Shiite Muslim holiday will not end until Feb. 10.
The elections law was originally passed Nov. 8, in a vote hailed by the Obama administration, which sees the election as a milestone in its plans to withdraw all but 50,000 troops from the country by next August.
But Hashimi, one of three members of Iraq’s Presidency Council, each with the power of veto, rejected the law, saying it gave too little representation to millions of Iraqi exiles, many of them Sunni Arabs. The tentative pact addresses that issue.
