SIX weeks ago, full of hope and apprehension, Abdullah Hussein stepped out into the street, braving the threat of bombs, bullets and mortars, to cast his vote in Iraq’s first free election. Now he is wondering what it was all for.

“We risked our lives and we put our families in danger to vote because we believed in a government that could bring us a better future,” said the 26-year-old car mechanic, wringing his hands in despair. “But all we’ve ended up with is a bunch of people fighting over who will get what, just like kids fighting for sweets. Maybe we shouldn’t have voted for these people. Maybe we shouldn’t have voted at all.”

One month after the results of the election were announced, an agreement on a government is yet to be reached and the people who took their lives in their hands to vote are growing disillusioned with their new leaders even before they have had the chance to take power.

Work at many ministries has all but ground to a halt as workers wait to see if they will still have a job. And behind the scenes, the bickering continues between the two largest vote-getters, the United Iraqi Alliance, known as the Shia List, and the Kurdish alliance, over who can get what in the deal to form a new government. The Shia List won a slim majority but not the two-thirds required to begin forming a government, forcing them to seek alliance with the Kurds.

The Kurds, in turn, see this as their opportunity to press their demands over self-rule.Hardly a day goes by without a high-level meeting between the two sides as the debate rages over who can get what out of the deal. The press in Baghdad has all but given up documenting its Byzantine twists and turns, because news about the negotiations has a shelf-life of no more than a few hours.

Now, as the opening of the parliament this week draws nearer, the bickering has if anything grown worse and certainly more public. The Kurds are getting angry at the not wholly unfounded perception that it is they who are holding up the deal. Shia leaders are complaining that the Kurdish demands are so inflexible it is impossible to bow to them whilst still maintaining the support of their own people. The hard part was meant to be how to include the Sunnis, who boycotted the vote, in the new government. As ever the victims are the Iraqi people, caught in a renewed cycle of violence they had hoped to escape.

“When so many people turned out to vote, the terrorists felt disappointed and frustrated and we felt extremely happy because most of the attacks stopped,” said Mohammed Shati, 32, a shopkeeper. “But when they realised that nothing had really changed, everything started again.”

Among some Sunnis who willingly boycotted the vote, there is a palpable sense of schadenfreude. “This is exactly what we expected to happen. That’s why we didn’t vote,” said Maywan Shakir al Oubeidi, 33, a Sunni garage owner. “(It) was an illegitimate process which will lead to an illegitimate government.”

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