BAGHDAD (Reuters) — Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki won landslide victories over Shi’a rivals in provincial elections at the weekend, reflecting a seismic shift in the political landscape, preliminary results issued on Thursday showed.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki

Results showed big wins for the prime minister’s State of Law coalition in the capital Baghdad and the second largest city Basra, giving him and his party a major boost before national elections at the end of the year.
Maliki’s allies also scored smaller but substantial victories in eight of nine other Shi’a provinces in the south.

Saturday’s provincial election was the most peaceful in Iraq since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, hailed as a sign of progress by Washington as it plans a gradual withdrawal of its 140,000 troops.

Maliki campaigned across the country on a law-and-order platform, claiming credit for improvements in security.

Although his own Dawa Party has Shi’a Islamist roots, he campaigned with virtually no reference to religion, a tactic that seemed to appeal to voters exhausted by years of sectarian warfare.

A man watches the preliminary results of provincial elections on television in Baghdad February 5, 2009. Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki won landslide victories over Shi’a rivals in provincial elections, reflecting a seismic shift in the political landscape, preliminary results issued on Thursday showed. REUTERS/Atef Hassan

Secularist and independent parties also fared well across Iraq, the results showed, after being largely swamped by religious parties in the last election in 2005.
By contrast, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (ISCI) — until now Iraq’s dominant Shi’a party — relied on religious images and slogans extensively throughout in its campaign, and did not win a single province.

Although Iraq is now largely quieter than at any time since the United States invaded in 2003, a suicide bomber in the north killed 15 people hours before the poll results were unveiled, a reminder that peace remains an elusive goal.

The suicide bombing was the bloodiest attack in weeks. At the height of Iraq’s violence a year and a half ago such attacks were a daily occurrence.

Results released by the independent election commission showed Maliki’s State of Law bloc winning 38 percent of votes in the capital and 37 percent in Basra, the province that includes the second largest city and most of Iraq’s oil exports.

A group backed by Shi’a cleric Muqtada al-Sadr placed second in Baghdad with just 9 percent of the vote. In Basra ISCI placed second with 11.6 percent.

State of Law’s margins of victory were smaller in other Shi’a provinces, and the next weeks are expected to see parties scrambling to form coalitions in the regional councils which elect powerful governors.

In Iraq’s most violent province, Nineveh in the north, Sunni Arab parties won most votes. The Sunnis make up the majority there, but Kurds had controlled the provincial government because many Sunnis boycotted elections in 2005.

U.S. and Iraqi military commanders hope a return of Sunnis to provincial power there will ease violence in the provincial capital Mosul, where Sunni Arab anger at exclusion from power has helped al Qaeda Islamists maintain a foothold.

In Anbar province, once the heartland of the Sunni Arab insurgency, a secular party, the religious Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP) and tribal sheikhs appeared to split the votes close to evenly. The sheikhs had vowed to take up arms if the IIP won.

Maliki was long seen as a weak leader with little clout in the regional governments that run Iraq’s towns and villages. He relied on support from ISCI and Sadr to take power in 2006.

But he won popular support last year, especially in Basra and Shi’a parts of Baghdad, with a crackdown that reclaimed streets controlled by Sadr’s militia, and also by presiding over the sharp decline in violence over the past year.