Zahraa albachachy
Zahraa albachachy

@ZahraaAlbach

11 tweets May 01, 2026
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Iraq has a new PM-designate. A 40-year-old billionaire businessman who has never held public office. His supporters call him a technocrat. But there is a specific question the economic data raises that nobody is asking yet. 🧡
What Iraqis needed at this moment was a strong candidate capable of navigating simultaneous crises β€” a disrupted oil economy, a budget deficit, a five-month political vacuum, and deep structural corruption.
What they got is a figure with no party, no political base, and no independent mandate. A PM who owes his position to a coalition consensus is not free to govern. He is managed.
The governance gap. Unlike his predecessors, al-Zaidi has no history in political office or government administration. In private business, your word is policy - decisions move at the speed of ownership.
Governing Iraq means negotiating 42 ministries, 329 parliamentarians, sectarian quotas and a system built to resist change. A PM without political muscle can’t push any of that. When government is stuck, it is the economic livelihood of ordinary people that absorbs the cost.
The conflict of interest that deserves naming. Al-Zaidi’s company holds contracts to supply staple foods to Iraq’s Public Distribution System -the subsidised food programme that feeds millions of the country’s poorest. He built his fortune as a direct supplier to the state.
He must govern without institutional firewalls which Iraq does not have. a PM unable to move politically is also unable to reduce the corruption embedded in the very system his business depends on. The people least able to absorb that are the ones holding ration cards.
The structural question Iraq deserves to ask openly: Iraq’s system has repeatedly preferred figures with limited independent political backing - so the coalition retains decision-making power while the PM executes preferred policies.
Is al-Zaidi a genuine reformer handed an impossible brief at the worst possible moment? Or a consensus figure chosen precisely because he will not disrupt the system that made him wealthy? Iraq deserves the benefit of the doubt. And the honest question.
The cruelest irony of al-Zaidi’s appointment is timing!! Iraq needs a PM with maximum political capital to push through reforms under maximum economic pressure, and instead has a PM with minimum political capital appointed under maximum economic pressure.
The two variables move in precisely the wrong direction at precisely the wrong moment, and it is Iraqi households -not political parties - that will live with that arithmetic daily.

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