Word: blocs
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...charities across the country and operates offices in various towns and cities. When the regime let its guard down, under pressure from the Bush Administration, for the first round of parliamentary elections in 2005, Brotherhood members running as independents captured 88 of 454 seats, making them the largest opposition bloc in parliament...
...ElBaradei has yet to signal whether he'll allow the Islamists to join his coalition. But some say the support of the Brotherhood as a bloc would give any reform movement the spine it needs to stand up to a regime willing to get tough. Such an alliance would also greatly expand the grass-roots organizational reach of ElBaradei's coalition, which has thus far been unable to set up regional campaign offices or raise funds in a closely controlled political system. "The national coalition doesn't need Tagamma or the Nasserists," says Joshua Stacher, an Egypt expert at Kent...
Meanwhile, Iraq's political parties are trying to cobble together a coalition government out of the results of the March 7 elections, which produced no clear-cut winner. (Sectarian divisions still define the political scene. A Sunni-supported bloc just barely accumulated the most seats - though nothing close to a majority in the legislature - and is fighting to form a government in the face of a multitude of Shi'ite representatives.) Every organization issued statements or interviews condemning the attacks, using them to take shots at rival groups. "The best solution for Iraq is that the winning political blocs should...
...Sunnis are having none of it. Having boycotted the 2005 election, they participated en masse this time, handing Allawi what they consider to be a clear victory. Some leading members of his bloc have warned that violence would be the consequence if the Iraqiya list were denied what they consider to be their right to lead the government. Iraq's Sunnis have been suspicious of the Shi'ite-led government of al-Maliki, not without reason, and there has been an acute sense of betrayal among the former insurgents who joined the Sunni Awakening, which facilitated the success...
There may be an element of truth in that charge, because Iran has previously backed the broad Shi'ite-Kurdish alliance that brought al-Maliki to power, and is clearly pressing for another friendly, Shi'ite-led government in Baghdad. Allawi is fiercely antagonistic toward Tehran, and his bloc was strongly backed by Sunni Arab regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, which are leery of Iranian influence in Arab lands. (Those governments have been standoffish toward al-Maliki.) (See pictures of the U.S. troops in Iraq...