JACK STRAW hinted yesterday that elections in Iraq could be brought forward to this summer, as a powerful Iraqi Shia Muslim cleric and thousands of his followers have demanded.

In an apparent climbdown, the Foreign Secretary said that it could be possible to hold elections to choose a transitional Iraqi government in June.

His comments marked a stark change from the present plans announced in November, which envisage the United States-led coalition handing over power to an interim Iraqi government chosen by regional caucuses. Under the original timetable, elections would be held next year.

However, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the reclusive spiritual leader of the Shias — who make up 60 per cent of Iraq’s population — has insisted on direct elections to choose the transitional government. His demands threaten to scupper the smooth handover of power and triggered crisis talks this week at the White House and the United Nations to find a compromise.

The British and American governments had previously ruled out early elections as impractical. Only a week ago, Paul Bremer, the US administrator in Iraq, told CBS television: “At present, there is not an electoral commission, there is no electoral law, there are no political party laws, there is no census, no voter registration, there are no electoral constituencies. There are none of the things that you need to conduct a legitimate and effective election here in the next six months.”

Yesterday, however, Mr Straw told the World Economic Forum in Davos: “We want elections as soon as it is feasible to hold them. We have to take account of what Ayatollah al-Sistani is proposing. Either a solution is possible or not. The discussion which has been stimulated by Ayatollah al-Sistani is whether there could be an element of elections injected into the earlier part of the process.”

Mr Straw pointed out that there were no electoral registers and that in parts of Iraq there were still security issues that could make elections difficult. The debate can probably be resolved only by the UN. Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, is expected to send a factfinding team to Iraq to assess the feasibility of elections.

A senior UN official said yesterday that it wanted to bridge the differences between the two sides and hoped to have a report ready by the end of next month. He said that the organisation was wary of being caught in the middle.

A spokesman for Ayatollah al-Sistani said that the cleric welcomed the expected arrival of the UN team, the first officials to visit Iraq since UN staff were evacuated from the country last year after two suicide-bomb attacks.

The Shia spiritual leader, who lives in the holy city of Najaf, has indicated that he would accept a UN verdict on how soon elections can be organised in Iraq.

US and British officials are already investigating how practical it would be to hold elections without widespread fraud or abuse. Although there is no electoral register, there is a national list used for rations.

The Foreign Office is concerned that the elections must be sufficiently free and fair to be widely regarded as legitimate, with the worst outcome being elections in which there was little public confidence.

America and Britain have been worried that holding early elections before secular political parties are ready will hand success to religious leaders, with some American policymakers concerned that Shia parties will try to turn Iraq into an Islamic state like Iran.

One UN expert said: “The overwhelming experience of the UN is that trying to hold elections too early in a post-conflict situation tends to scrape off old scars. There is no party loyalty in Iraq, no loyalty towards presidential candidates, no civil society and no harmony.”

Yet the alternative could be even more explosive. Over recent days tens of thousands of supporters of Ayatollah al-Sistani have protested across Iraq’s southern cities and Baghdad demanding early elections. The protests put the US and Britain in the awkward position of liberating Iraq in the name of democracy, only to resist calls for direct elections.

Mr Straw said yesterday: “You can’t object to elections — it’s called democracy. One of the things about democracy is sometimes people win who you don’t want to win.” He emphasised that he was not opposed to Islamic parties winning the election. “We have religious parties all over Europe — the Christian Democrats. Turkey elected an Islamic Government, shock horror, but, as everyone discovered, it has been a delight to do business with.” He also made comparison with Britain, where the Head of State is the head of the established Church, whose bishops are appointed to pass laws.

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