Saddam Hussein may not like it, but he has a stake in the future of the new Iraq. Like thousands of other prisoners, the former President has a vote in this week’s parliamentary elections. It is not known whether he will deign to dip his index finger in blue ink, that indelible symbol of Iraq’s progress towards a democratic state. But many of his fellow inmates had no hesitation. In prisons, and also hospitals, advance voting was yesterday under way to elect 275 deputies for a four-year term.

On Thursday, Iraqis will vote for the third time this year, after electing the interim Government last January and ratifying the Constitution in October. While those could be regarded as faltering first steps, Iraqi democracy is developing. This should be a matter of pride for the British servicemen and women who have helped to make it possible, and reassuring for anyone genuinely interested in long-term stability in the region.

But this is no ordinary election. The willingness of insurgents to blow up any number of ordinary Iraqis daring to vote demands tight security at each of the 6,000 polling stations. Jordan sealed its border with Iraq last night. Iraq’s other frontiers will be closed from today as its people begin a five-day public holiday. Night-time curfews will be extended and all vehicular traffic will be banned on Thursday. Such conditions are used by some to diminish the voting, and they are clearly not ideal. But quibbling misses the wider point.

Iraq is currently a difficult country for foreigners to move around. Despite the impressive efforts of courageous journalists, it can be hard to tap into grassroots opinion. The poll released by the BBC yesterday therefore makes interesting reading, especially for those who believed that most Iraqis spent most of their days in darkness and under fire. Some 71 per cent consider the conditions of their personal lives to be good and 64 per cent believe they will improve in the coming year. A slim majority believes the country’s overall situation to be bad, but 69 per cent expect it to improve. Westerners who point to positives in Iraq tend to be dismissed as Panglossian. Yet more than six in ten Iraqis say they feel safe in their neighbourhoods, an increase from 39 per cent 22 months ago. Six out of ten say local security is good, up from half. The figures may not compare well with Chelsea. But Iraqis sense movement that we, from a distance, find harder to detect. Their optimism is not based on nothing.

There are further grounds for hope.The new assembly (a quarter of which will be made up of women, making it considerably more progressive than the Conservative Party) will be more ethnically representative than the outgoing institution, the Sunnis having realised their mistake in boycotting the January poll. As such, it stands a better chance of winning the confidence of the Sunni minority, further separating that community from the insurgency. Former radicals, such as the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, have also embraced politics, for the time being.

Of course Iraqis want to say goodbye to foreign troops, and from next year they will almost certainly begin to. But first they want improved domestic security and strong leaders. It is time for Iraqi politicians to prove themselves able leaders and not narrow-minded partisans. And plans to withdraw coalition troops must fit the Iraqi political calendar, not that of the US Congress, which is increasingly distant from the realities of Baghdad life.