Middle East News
Official Iraqi Kurdish election results confirm incumbent victories
Aug 8, 2009, 12:20 GMT
Arbil, Iraq- Final results from last month's Iraqi Kurdish elections published Saturday confirmed that the incumbent president and parliamentary bloc handily won the polls.
Kurdish President Massoud Barzani won a landslide victory, with 70 per cent of the votes, the final results, published in Baghdad's al- Sabah newspaper, confirmed.
A coalition of his Kurdish Democratic Party (KDP) and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani's Democratic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) won 59 out of 100 elected seats in the Kurdish parliament, Sardar Abdel- Karim, a representative of Iraq's electoral commission, told the paper.
The opposition movement Change, led by breakaway PUK member Nawshirwan Moustafa, won 25 seats, followed by the Reform and Services party, which won 13 seats, and the Islamic Movement, which won two seats. The Freedom and Justice coalition won a single seat.
An additional 11 seats are reserved for ethnic and religious minorities. These were distributed among the Turkman Democratic Movement (three seats), the Turkman Reform Movement (one seat), the Turkman Arbil slate (one seat), and six seats for Christians.
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