Something I've been meaning to post for awhile, but never got around to it. I think Den Beste has the right analysis on the Iraqi Constitution's Presidency Council.
The meat of it is below:
denbeste.nu
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The Presidency Council in the Iraqi system is far more important than the President of Germany, but does not have as much power as the Presidents of the US or France. Its powers were very carefully tuned, as was its size and the means by which its members are selected. Most of the real power in the Executive branch belongs to the Prime Minister.
The Presidency Council includes three positions. One is formally called the President and the other two are considered Deputy Presidents, but the titles appear to be meaningless in practice.
All actions by the Presidency Council must be unanimous. If there is a power granted to the Presidency which it must act to wield, all three must agree.
Article 36 describes the way that the three positions of the Presidency Council are filled. A single list of three candidates must be proposed to the Assembly, and it must be approved by a two thirds majority.
And that is where the magic happens, boys and girls. That threshold was deliberately set higher than the level of the demographic Shiite majority. If one assumes that representation in the Assembly will more or less mirror demographic numbers, then this means that Shiite members of the assembly cannot fill the positions in the Presidency Council over unanimous Kurdish and Sunni objections.
What will happen is this: the President (the guy who gets to wear that title) will be Shiite. The other two members will be a Sunni and a Kurd. The constitution does not explicitly specify that it must be like that, but that's how it will be.
In a hundred years, if this system lasts that long, one hopes that a lot of interfaction rivalry will have died down. By that point, it won't be important any longer that the Council be divided that way. And since this is not a semantic requirement in the constitution, it won't have to be. But for the foreseeable future the Presidency Council will always be made up of a Shiite President, a Kurdish deputy and a Sunni deputy.
The powers granted to the Presidency council are great enough to permit the Kurdish and Sunni deputies from preventing the Shiites from using the government to screw them over, but not so great as to permit them to extort unreasonable concessions. The Presidency Council was designed to prevent the tyranny of the majority without creating a significant risk of tyranny of the minority.
By far the most important power of the Presidency Council involves selection of the Prime Minister, who is the real power in the executive branch. That process is described in Article 38:
The Presidency Council shall name a Prime Minister unanimously, as well as the members of the Council of Ministers upon the recommendation of the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister and Council of Ministers shall then seek to obtain a vote of confidence by simple majority from the National Assembly prior to commencing their work as a government. The Presidency Council must agree on a candidate for the post of Prime Minister within two weeks. In the event that it fails to do so, the responsibility of naming the Prime Minister reverts to the National Assembly. In that event, the National Assembly must confirm the nomination by a two-thirds majority. If the Prime Minister is unable to nominate his Council of Ministers within one month, the Presidency Council shall name another Prime Minister.
No single member of the Presidency Council can provoke a crisis by refusing to act, as a means of extorting huge concessions. The Presidency Council loses its chance to pick the Prime Minister if it delays two weeks, so there's a strong incentive for the three members of the Presidency Council to cooperate. On the other hand, since they must approve the Prime Minister unanimously, this means that he cannot be an extremist or zealot. He has to be acceptable to all three major factions.
Therefore, the Prime Minister will be centrist, politically. And this is an emergent result of the structure; it isn't a semantic provision. Nothing says "The Prime Minister has to be centrist"; it's just going to work out that way.
The primary benefit of this is to reduce fear on the part of the Sunnis and Kurds. These mechanisms were carefully tailored to make it so that they can feel confident that the government will not end up as a Shiite bludgeon. That makes it far more likely that they'll be willing to actively participate in and support this system. |
