Election Panel Puts Off Start of Iraq Parliament Races

Iraq’s independent elections commission announced Thursday that the parliamentary elections campaign, scheduled to start Sunday, would be postponed for five days, as confusion reigned over an appeals court decision that overturned a ban on hundreds of candidates.

The campaign for the March 7 elections will now begin Feb. 12, said Qassim al-Obudi, a spokesman for the elections commission, to give officials time to try to determine which candidates are eligible to be on the ballots.

The decision appeared to deepen Iraq’s political crisis, as the speaker of Parliament called an emergency session to debate the court ruling and election officials appealed to Iraq’s Supreme Court for guidance.

Iraqi officials said some lawmakers had even begun discussing the possibility of postponing the elections until the candidates’ eligibility was resolved. That may prove problematic; the election has long been viewed as a milestone in the United States’ plans to withdraw combat troops from Iraq by the end of August.

The tumult followed the appeals court decision on Wednesday, which effectively allowed more than 500 candidates who were disqualified last month by a government commission to take part in the election. They had been accused of promoting the Baath Party of former President Saddam Hussein.

Technically, the court decided that the candidates’ status should be determined after the election, in what could be the makings of another crisis. “This doesn’t solve the crisis; it postpones it indefinitely,” said Hadi al-Ameri, a leading Shiite lawmaker who has tried to help mediate the dispute.

Many Iraqi politicians, along with foreign diplomats, have been pushing for a resolution to the dispute, saying the elections could lack credibility if hundreds of candidates were excluded.

Confusion over the appeals court’s decision led Faraj al-Haidari, the head of the Independent High Electoral Commission, to question whether it was binding.

“We sent the Supreme Court an urgent letter asking if we have to adhere to the appeals court decision,” Mr. Haidari said in an interview. “The appeals court neither found them guilty nor declared them innocent, which puts it in contradiction with the electoral law.”

Ali al-Dabbagh, a spokesman for the government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, declared the ruling “illegal and unconstitutional.”

The latest escalation in the dispute over who is permitted to run in the elections has unsettled the political landscape. Iraqi law remains untested and perhaps bereft of mechanisms to reach a solution just a month before the vote.

“I know what is happening today, but no one knows what’s going to happen tomorrow,” said Omar al-Mashhadani, a spokesman for Parliament’s speaker, Ayad al-Samarrai.

Mr. Maliki has requested an emergency session of Parliament on Sunday, Iraqi state television reported. Mr. Samarrai agreed to call the session, and in turn asked for an emergency meeting of Iraq’s leadership on Friday or Saturday.

Reactions to the court’s decision to overturn the ban on candidates predictably broke along political and sectarian lines on Thursday.

Former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, whose main ally, Saleh al-Mutlaq, a Sunni leader, was among those barred, warned about the possibility that some candidates might still be disqualified. “The country will go into severe turmoil, I’m sure. It will cause a backlash,” he said in an interview.

Many critics of the ban viewed it as an attempt to marginalize secular and Sunni opponents of Iraq’s religious Shiite parties, including Mr. Maliki’s. Some leaders and voters had threatened to boycott the elections if officials went ahead with the ban, recalling the election in 2005, when many Sunnis refused to vote.

Religious Shiite leaders accused the appeals court of buckling to what they described as outside pressure, in particular from the United States.

Allowing the candidates to run in the elections “is a badge of shame on the forehead of the government,” Moktada al-Sadr, a radical Shiite cleric, said in a statement. “I am hopeful that the Iraqi people will not allow their return and their participation in a political process thought to be democratic.”

Iraqi legal experts defended the court’s decision to postpone the determinations of the candidates’ eligibility, calling it constitutional, and said election officials should respect the ruling. “The appeals court didn’t find the candidates who were included in the procedures innocent yet,” said Tariq Harb, a prominent lawyer. “It just delayed its decision.”

But Mr. Ameri, the Shiite lawmaker, said the ruling, by postponing decisions on eligibility until after the elections, could deepen the political crisis. Like others, he wondered whether lawmakers could actually be unseated after they had won elections, and, if so, what branch of the government would unseat them.