meet the new law, same as the old law

"Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh told al-Sharq al-Awsat yesterday that provincial elections elections would be held with the old law at the end of December if the new one couldn't be quickly passed. There have actually been a flurry of such comments in the Iraqi press over the last few days, including comments by Yusif Ahmed, a member of Parliament from the Kurdish bloc, that he expected a reversion to the old law and another MP saying that the parties in the government (which he didn't name) were talking up the legal status of the old law as a way to hold the elections before the end of this year, Ammar al-Hakim suddenly talking up early elections (scan to Visser's Sept 11 post), and more.

I had inititally shrugged off those remarks as bargaining gambits, threats made to try and force an agreement at a time when by most reports the ongoing consultations weren't getting anywhere, tempers were rising, and the "July 22" group was demanding that Talabani and Abd al-Mehdi retract their vetoes and even threatening a boycott of Parliament. But then I started hearing rumors that a deal was actually in the works to actually do this, to evert to the old closed-list law just in order to get the elections done by the end of the year. I just don't know how much truth there is to those rumors, although the sudden burst of such commentary suggests that the idea is at least circulating"
Abu Aardvark