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BAGHDAD: Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani has cast himself as the leader who can finally make the country a success after years of instability, and has moved against established parties that brought him to power as he seeks a second term.

Buoyed by signs of rising public support ahead of a November 11 parliamentary election, an increasingly confident Al-Sudani is running against key members of a grouping of parties and armed groups that originally tapped him for the job.

Campaigning on improving basic services and presenting himself as the man who can successfully balance ties with both Washington and Tehran, he says he expects to get the single-largest share of seats. Many analysts agree that Al-Sudani, in power since 2022 and leader of the Construction and Development Coalition, is the frontrunner.

However, no party is able to form a government on its own in Iraq’s 329-member legislature, and so parties have to build alliances with other groups to become an administration, a fraught process that often takes many months.

Al-Sudani, 55, has done many key jobs in Iraq’s volatile political system and is the only post-2003 premier who never left the country, unlike others who went into exile and returned, often with new citizenships, after the US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

He has the tricky task of balancing Iraq’s unusual role as an ally of both Washington and Tehran, while trying to satisfy Iraqis desperate for jobs and services and protect himself in a world of cut-throat politics.

In 2024, allegations that staff in the premier’s office had spied on senior officials caused uproar. A political adviser to Sudani denied the claims.

Born on March 4, 1970 in Baghdad to a family originally from rural southern Maysan province, Al-Sudani worked as an agricultural supervisor under Saddam’s government, even though his father and other relatives were killed for political activism. Since the 2003 US-led invasion he has been a mayor, a member of a provincial council, a regional governor, twice a Cabinet minister and then prime minister. “When we speak of someone who stayed in Iraq all these decades, it means they understand Iraqis as people and the Iraqi system,” Al-Sudani said in 2023.

Iraq is navigating a politically sensitive effort to disarm the country’s militias amid pressure from the US, while at the same time negotiating with Washington to implement an agreement on a phased withdrawal of US troops.

But Al-Sudani said ahead of next week’s vote that any effort to bring all weapons under state control would not work as long as there is a US-led coalition in the country that some Iraqi factions view as an occupying force.