He said that he was leaving parliament and would be seeking other ways to influence what's happening in Iraq. He couldn’t do that, however, and so in response to that, he asked his parliamentarians to resign. The number of seats that any single party is able to win has never been a large enough majority that they can actually form a government by themselves without the need to form alliances with everyone else, so he tried to do this by alienating his political rivals-which happened to be from the same religious group, the Shi`a community. He wasn't able to do this because since 2005, Iraq's political system has mainly resulted in a consensus parliament and a consensus government. He tried to set up a system where he and his allies were the majority in parliament, and where everyone else was in opposition. He has grown a large following and actually won the largest number of seats in the last election in 2021. Since then, he transformed into a political leader.
Marsin Alshamary: The situation in Iraq right now involves Muqtada al-Sadr-who everyone remembers from the early 2000s as being the leader of the Shi’a opposition to the U.S. Jon Alterman: Can you briefly describe the standoff that's going on now outside of Iraq's parliament? Do you think we're at serious risk of violence? Marsin Alshamary: Thank you so much, Jon. Marsin, thank you for joining us on Babel. After earning her PhD from MIT, she was a postdoctoral fellow with the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution until earlier this year. Marsin Alshamary is a research fellow with the Middle East Initiative at Harvard's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Responding to Egregious Human Rights Abuses.Building Sustainable and Inclusive Democracy.