Ali Al-Zaidi sworn in as Iraq's prime minister with a program already failed

Shafaq News

Every Iraqi
government since 2003 has arrived with a program containing the same
commitments: weapons under state control, anti-corruption measures, electricity
reform, banking restructuring, agricultural development, reduced oil
dependence, improved education, and neutrality between regional axes. Every
program has produced the same outcome, not failure exactly, but continuation,
with the files remaining open, the crises recurring, and the next government
inheriting the same document with updated formatting.

Ali al-Zaidi
was chosen because he was a political outsider with no bloc, no constituency,
and no independent power base. That is the first reason his program will
struggle: the forces most capable of blocking reform are the forces that
selected him, and they did not select him to confront them.

Al-Zaidi,
sworn in on May 14, 2026, submitted his ministerial program built around
“a stable state, a productive economy, and balanced partnerships.” A
comparison of his 14-point platform with those of his two predecessors —Mohammed
Shia al-Sudani and Mustafa al-Kadhimi— found that the vast majority of its core
commitments appeared verbatim in one or both previous programs without having
been resolved.

The problem
now is whether the conditions under which he operates give him any more room
than the men who wrote the same sentences before him.

Built to Be
Managed

Al-Zaidi
built his career almost entirely outside elected government, born in Dhi Qar
province in 1986, holding degrees in law and finance, with his professional
life unfolding overwhelmingly in the private sector. His designation came after
a meeting at the residence of Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) leader Falih
al-Fayyad, agreed upon by both former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki and
caretaker Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani to break a deadlock after
Washington threatened to withhold Iraq’s access to the petrodollar over
al-Maliki’s candidacy.

He was
selected, according to sources familiar with the negotiations, because he had
no political bloc, meaning none of the eight leading Shiite Coordination
Framework chiefs needed to fear he would use the premiership to eclipse them.

A political
source told Shafaq News that the system chose al-Zaidi for the same reason it
chose his predecessors: because a man with no independent power base “is
easier to manage than one who arrives with a mandate.”

That
calculation carries a precedent the Coordination Framework may not have fully
priced in. Three of those same chiefs —al-Maliki, Haidar al-Abadi, and
al-Sudani— were also once chosen as manageable outsiders and used the
premiership to build parliamentary blocs they still deploy today. Whether
al-Zaidi follows that pattern or is genuinely contained by it is the question
his government cannot yet answer.

His business
background introduces a more immediate complication. Al-Zaidi previously served
as chairman of Al-Janoob Islamic Bank, which was sanctioned by the United
States in 2024 over alleged money laundering on behalf of Iran and
Iranian-backed Iraqi Shiite armed groups. While al-Zaidi is not himself under
sanctions, the designation placed an institution he once led at the center of
the precise tension he must now navigate as head of government: Washington
demands banking compliance and PMF reform; the PMF-aligned coalition that
selected him depends on the financial architecture those demands are designed
to dismantle. That is a structural contradiction at its core.

Guns Nobody
Will Hand Over

No
commitment is more central or more predictably contested than the monopoly of
arms, and every government since 2003 has made it without achieving it, because
the armed factions that would need to disarm are participants in the political
system, not adversaries of it.

A source who
requested anonymity told Shafaq News that Iraq has 34 armed groups, most
already part of the PMF, whose members largely answer to Iran rather than the
prime minister, with the leader of one group stating he would overthrow the
Iraqi government if Iran’s supreme leader requested it.

Al-Maliki,
one of al-Zaidi’s kingmakers, described talk of dissolving or merging the PMF
as “rumor,” insisting any development should preserve its strength.
The Stimson Center has argued the opposite, that ambiguities around command
hierarchy, budgetary oversight, and integration into the national security
framework have become persistent sources of tension, and that without reform,
the PMF risks accruing excessive independent power.

Factions
insist any handover would be to the PMF itself, arguing it is a state
institution because parliament legalized it. But the PMF is an umbrella
dominated by the same groups claiming compliance, many of which retain their
own chains of command, intelligence units, economic networks, and external
loyalties. “Moving weapons from factions to an institution they themselves
control is not disarmament. It is rebranding.”

Al-Zaidi
enters this debate with no independent security constituency, no parliamentary
bloc, and a cabinet that could not agree on a defense minister.

Washington,
Tehran, and the Squeeze

The
geopolitical pressure on al-Zaidi’s government is also structural, and its two
poles pull in opposite directions.

Washington’s
demands are specific: PMF reform, banking compliance, and continued cooperation
on dollar-transfer mechanisms to prevent currency from reaching sanctioned
entities in Tehran. The US-Iran war and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz
have sharpened that agenda considerably. For Washington, al-Zaidi’s Al-Janoob
Bank history is a data point in an active sanctions enforcement posture, and
his government will need to demonstrate credible separation from that history
to access the financial cooperation Iraq’s dollar-dependent economy requires.

Tehran’s
interests point in the opposite direction. The PMF’s financial and operational
independence is part of Iran’s regional influence framework, and any prime
minister who genuinely reforms the PMF or the banking channels that sustain it
threatens a network Iran has spent two decades building in Iraq.

The
coalition that selected al-Zaidi is substantially composed of forces that
answer, at varying degrees of remove, to Tehran. He cannot reform that
coalition without confronting its external patron, and he cannot confront its
external patron without losing the political ground he was given.

That
triangle —Washington demanding compliance, Tehran requiring preservation, and
al-Zaidi holding office at the intersection— is the operative constraint
beneath every commitment in his program.

Washington’s
Blacklist

Thirty-five
Iraqi banks were effectively cut off from international dollar transactions in
February 2024 following a Central Bank decision prohibiting them from opening
dollar accounts or conducting international transfers, after a visit from a
senior US Treasury official aimed at cutting currency smuggling to Tehran.
Iraq’s private banking sector grew rapidly after 2003 by exploiting the Central
Bank’s currency auction system, where access to official exchange rate dollars
created profit opportunities that some banks channeled toward sanctioned
entities, particularly in Iran.

Al-Sudani’s
government cooperated with American institutions to restructure state banks,
but the project froze under sanctions pressure and inadequate capital. Al-Zaidi
inherits a sector where a significant fraction of private institutions cannot
conduct international transactions, and where his prior chairmanship of a
sanctioned bank makes his credibility as a reformer directly vulnerable to the
institutions he most needs to reform.

Anti-Corruption,
Again

Iraq ranked
140th globally in the 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index with a score of 26 out
of 100. The 2025 index showed marginal improvement: 136th out of 182 countries
with a score of 28, still well below the global average of 43. The trajectory
is real but narrow. Iraq moved 32 places in seven years, while President Barham
Salih estimated in 2021 that $150 billion in oil revenues had been stolen and
smuggled since the 2003 invasion, in an economy that remains predominantly
cash-based and makes money flows almost impossible to trace.

Al-Zaidi’s
program names anti-corruption as a priority without specifying what makes this
iteration different. The structural reason previous efforts produced limited
results is the political economy: the patronage networks that sustain the Shiite
Coordination Framework, the National Sunni Council, and the Kurdish forces are
the same networks any credible investigation would need to penetrate. A
government assembled by those networks cannot simultaneously dismantle them
without dismantling the coalition that sustains it.

Where the
Money Runs Out

The
electricity crisis has been declared solvable by every Iraqi prime minister
since 2003. The US-Iran war made a chronic problem acute: strikes on Iran’s
South Pars gas field in early 2026 knocked more than 3,000 megawatts off the
national grid almost overnight.

Iraq now
faces peak summer demand of roughly 40 gigawatts against its current production
of approximately 29 gigawatts. The more revealing figure is fiscal: the federal
government recovers only 0.17% of total electricity revenue —approximately
$763,000 per month —covering almost none of its operational costs. A ministry
that cannot recover its running costs cannot invest in the grid. A grid that
cannot be invested in cannot close a gap that two decades of deferred
commitment have widened to the point where blackouts of up to 12 hours a day
were already triggering street protests before the war began.

The same
fiscal logic runs through agriculture and education. Provincial cultivation
quotas have been cut by more than 60% in recent seasons due to drought, while
the modern irrigation technology that previous programs promised remains
largely unimplemented in a country bisected by the Tigris and Euphrates that
continues to rely on flood irrigation.

Education
faces a documented deficit of approximately 7,000 school buildings, a number
that has appeared in government briefings for years without being closed,
despite al-Sudani’s Chinese-funded thousand-schools project. Both sectors
require capital investment. The capital is currently paying salaries.

The
Inheritance

Al-Sudani
delivered measurable results —Iraq’s corruption ranking improved 14 places in
2024 alone— and maintained domestic stability through a regional war. He also
left nine cabinet posts unfilled, withdrew the PMF law under US pressure, and
accumulated a fiscal deficit of 8.81 trillion dinars (approximately $6.7
billion) in the first three quarters of 2025, while the oil price required to
balance the budget rose to $84 per barrel against a market trading well below
it.

Al-Zaidi’s
potential advantages are real but narrow. His business background gives him
financial literacy that his predecessors lacked. His absence from a political
bloc means he carries none of the factional debts that constrained al-Sudani.
His cross-communal endorsement reflects a genuine opening in Iraq’s post-war
political atmosphere. But the IMF’s 2025 Article IV mission found that Iraq’s
vulnerabilities have increased due to large fiscal expansion, that public
employment costs are unsustainable, and that non-oil GDP is projected to slow
to just 1% in 2025, meaning every promise in his program requires money that is
currently paying salaries for a public sector the Washington Institute
estimates generates minimal productive output per employee per day.

The system
that produced al-Zaidi is the same system that will determine what his
government can deliver —designed to distribute oil revenues rather than build a
productive economy, to manage factional balance rather than enforce
institutional accountability, and to defer the hard decisions that reform
requires onto the next cycle. Previous premiers chosen on the same terms
eventually used the office to build independent standing.

What he has
inherited in the meantime is not a mandate for change but an invitation to
manage continuity, and the distance between those two things is the distance
between every program Iraq has written since 2003 and the country those
programs promised to build.

Written and
edited by Shafaq News staff.

Ali Al-Zaidi sworn in as Iraq’s prime minister with a program already failed

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