ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Kurdistan Region President Massoud Barzani said that last week’s elections must bring real shift in Iraqi politics, otherwise the autonomous Kurds would have no interest in remaining part of Baghdad’s complicated problems.

“If the elections do not cause change in Baghdad’s politics and position, and the political and security crisis only deepens, Kurdistan will have no choice but to stay out of Iraq’s complicated problems,” Barzani said in comments quoted on the presidential website.

He said that the Kurds have been participants in Iraq as stipulated by the constitution, “but Baghdad has not abided by the constitution, and violated it.”

His comments came just two days after Iraq-wide parliamentary polls, alongside which the Kurds also voted in their own local municipal elections. The final results have not been announced, but early counts show Barzani’s Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) is leading the way among other Kurdish parties in the Iraqi parliamentary polls.

In Kurdistan, Kurdish leaders expect the results from the local polls to bring changes in Erbil and the Kurdish government itself.

Leaders of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) are particularly pleased with how their party fared last week.

“The PUK has gained a happy victory and we expect even more,” said the PUK leadership in a statement on Saturday. “The results reversed all the wrong predictions.”

That statement came after initial counts from the provincial elections showed a dramatic increase in PUK votes across the Kurdistan Region, and especially in Sulaimani province.

In an interview with Rudaw, Mala Bakhtyar, a senior PUK member, said that his party had learned lessons from the Kurdish parliamentary polls last September, and that experience had proved useful in last week’s polls.

“In the previous election PUK supporters were dissatisfied,” Bakhtyar said. “But this time around, we took up the policy of how to reconcile with our voters. We criticized ourselves and promised to put into deeds that criticism.”

Bakhtyar said that despite his party’s reservations about a recent agreement signed between the KDP and Change Movement (Gorran) on forming the new Kurdish cabinet, the PUK will continue negotiations on possible participation in the new government.

Meanwhile on Sunday, the Kurdish parliament holds its second session, in which MPs are to name the new prime minister and pave the way for the new cabinet.

The incumbent Nechirvan Barzani is KDP’s nominee for prime minister, who with parliament in session and agreements already reached with several parties -- with the exception of the PUK -- is closer than before to forming a broad-based government.

Rudaw