Beforehand results published on Wednesday indicated the new coalition of Prime Minister Mohammed al- Sudani had won the most votes in the recent administrative bean. However, and importantly, it was not enough for it to simply form a government. With no clear victor from Tuesday’s vote, we can expect months of tough political horse-trading as the successful parliamentary lists vie to cobble together a bloc of sufficient size to actually govern.

Political experts say Mr. al-Sudani, who has been feverishly marketing himself to Washington as a bulwark against Iran, is in for a tough battle. Rivals want to block him from a second term. Official results will be published in the coming days, but early provincial tallies on Tuesday night already showed his list, Reconstruction and Development, winning the most seats.

Notably, its winning tickets are stacked with powerful tribal sheikhs and other influential hopefuls, while his most diehard cadres—the ones closest to him in his Al-Furratain group—will be the least likely to have won seats. This will be important: with al-Sudani now in caretaker mode following the election and his rivals now free to reignite their efforts to remove key allies (like al-Fayyad), he will need to quickly win over new allies to defend his own position. After all, the tribal sheikhs and MPs have used their place on al-Sudani’s list as a bargaining chip to access state resources in their service delivery and to speed up government approval for their constituents back home.

It also includes influential tribal sheikhs and some 53 incumbent MPs, most of whom had won as independents in 2021 or defected from parties within the Shia Coordination Framework (SCF), the main Shia parliamentary bloc that nominated al-Sudani four years ago.