1. The Iraqi Left Between Participation and Boycott in the 2025 Elections

This article comes at a critical political and organizational moment for the Iraqi left. Recent setbacks can no longer be explained by external factors alone. What we are experiencing is a real test of our will and our ability to invent new tools of action and new methodologies. The results achieved by most of the Iraqi left in the 2025 elections cannot be read as a passing electoral loss, nor merely as a direct outcome of an unfair electoral law and the dominance of political money. These external factors are undoubtedly real and influential, and they are compounded by even harsher challenges, namely the systematic restrictions and repression exercised by hegemonic forces, and the impact of structural corruption that distorts the entire field of struggle, making competition profoundly unequal.

However, focusing on external influences alone, despite their importance, is not sufficient to grasp the full picture. What actually occurred was a concentrated expression of a deeper crisis affecting organizational forms, modes of work, and the prevailing style of discourse and thinking within the Iraqi left in general, across all its factions. This is not a crisis of specific parties or leaders, but one that touches a distorted relationship between a correct idea and flawed tools. It is the relationship between a radical transformative discourse and the way it is presented and marketed within a highly complex and brutal political market, governed by security and financial dominance rather than free democratic competition. Despite this clear decline, the Iraqi left in all its currents remains the real hope and the most serious alternative for social change. The justice of its project and its latent capacity for organization and collective action still exist, but they await new forms of action that correspond to social transformations, and that are capable not only of improving mass influence, but also of inventing scientific and methodological tools suited to the current conditions of political and social struggle in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region.

From this dual diagnosis, internal dysfunction and external challenge, the real question becomes not only why most left forces failed to achieve the desired results in elections or even in boycott, nor why they failed to strengthen their political and social presence in general. Rather, why, despite the dire conditions of the masses and the rule of authoritarian and corrupt cliques in Baghdad and Erbil, did social change, despite its justice and necessity, fail to become a clear and convincing mass option? Why did the left project, in all its diversity, remain fragmented and contradictory in its mechanisms of action and struggle? Why, despite many points of convergence, have we not yet been able to build a unified framework around them that channels our diverse energies in one direction? In this situation, the masses did not see one coherent alternative, but a series of competing offers around the same idea, mostly adopting identical discourse, to the extent that one could easily change the name of the newspaper or party in their media and feel that the same party is being repeated, especially on immediate issues.

2. Can We Benefit from Capitalist Methodology, Fighting the Enemy with Its Advanced Tools

To understand this dysfunction, it becomes useful, and perhaps necessary, to look at the issue from a nontraditional angle. This requires a form of militant pragmatism that goes beyond intellectual rigidity, and proceeds from a critical awareness based on studying how the class enemy, capitalism, manages effectiveness, decline, and evaluation, and how it benefits from its technical and methodological tools without adopting its values or logic. From our leftist position, we can use certain mechanisms of scientific measurement and objective evaluation, which are in fact part of the Marxist heritage that placed science at its core, as a strict practical model for dealing with weakness and transforming failure into a tool for learning and reconstruction.

From here, the crisis of the Iraqi left can be read as a crisis of a just and good transformative product, with policies that appear theoretically correct, but that have not yet found the optimal forms for practical translation in line with the level of development of Iraqi society. The movement should proceed from theory to reality, not the reverse, with management and marketing that need development, and mechanisms that require updating, within a political market characterized by ruthless competition, dominated by religious and bourgeois nationalist parties with enormous resources. According to capitalist logic, it is not enough for a product to be good or socially necessary in order to succeed. Society is treated as a market, ideas as commodities, and social change as a product that can be promoted or excluded. When several companies enter the market carrying similar names and selling a single product called social change, but without harmony, coordination, or a clear brand, quality itself becomes a problem.

This is exactly what happened to the Iraqi left in the last elections. It was not only organizationally fragmented, but politically divided between participation and boycott, and conflicted over both. Enormous energies were spent in internal and external struggle over these two options, inside and outside organizations, ending with weak results in both. There was no unified position, no clear discourse, no collective tactic understandable to the masses, and participation occurred through different lists instead of one leftist list across Iraq. The scene appeared as a struggle between multiple, scattered, and confused versions. In this situation, the masses did not see one clearly defined product, but a series of similar products competing with each other instead of confronting the real competitors. What matters to the working masses is not the names of left organizations or their theoretical references, but who can actually push their lives one step forward, even gradually, in services, equality, justice, work, and other human rights.

Here, chaos and political weakness perform the task. The market itself punishes the incoherent transformative project, especially in a field dominated by organized competing forces that possess money, media, power, and high mobilization capacity. Chaotic multiplicity, contradictory discourse, differing political prices, underdeveloped marketing methods, confusion, and internal conflicts all undermine trust. The working men and women lose confidence not because they reject the idea of change, but because it reaches them in a fragmented, elitist, theoretical manner that does not match social development and daily needs, appears impractical or beyond their capacities, or leaves them unsure which version to choose and who truly represents it. Over time, social change shifts from an attractive alternative to a questionable commodity, then to an undesirable product, not due to its inherent weakness, but due to how it is delivered and presented in a distorted political market favoring opponents with stronger and more coherent tools. The use of market and product concepts here is not an adoption of capitalist logic or a promotion of its exploitative values, but a critical analytical description of the class enemy’s mechanisms, aimed at dismantling and understanding them in order to transcend them, not reproduce them.

3. The Left and Addressing Decline and Weakness

At moments of decline, the fundamental difference between capitalist logic and the logic of many left forces becomes clear. Capitalism does not return at every crisis to its classical theorists to ask whether their texts were fully applied, nor does it conduct internal trials asking where Adam Smith or Ricardo or Hayek and Friedman were misunderstood. It does not claim that the market failed because the books were not read well. As a practical system, capitalism treats decline as a technical signal that can be measured and addressed. It rapidly changes and develops tools, discourse, interfaces, and organizational mechanisms, without guilt, without sanctifying names, organizations, or history, and without fear of course correction. It uses scientific research and practical methods, collects data, analyzes numbers, studies consumer behavior, distributes questionnaires, conducts interviews, builds models, uses advanced technologies, digitalization, and artificial intelligence, tests hypotheses, and evaluates errors systematically. It asks with simplicity and rigor: why did the product fail? Where was trust lost? What confused consumers? Where is the flaw in management, name, form, message, timing, or access channels? Based on the answers, it rebuilds its policies, management, and organization across all levels, downsizing, changing mechanisms and policies, merging into larger entities, replacing leadership, and redistributing roles, all with one clear goal: restoring effectiveness and expanding in the market.

By contrast, some left forces tend, when facing decline, to return to classical theorists in search of answers, or to the glorious history of their parties decades ago. The real challenge, however, is not reviving texts, but applying the Marxist method itself, which calls for concrete analysis of concrete reality. The essential question should be: why is our message not reaching today, even though it concerns improving the lives of the masses? Why do we measure contemporary reality with the scale of the past century, instead of measuring our present performance with the scale of science, experience, and results according to current reality, and keeping pace with development in all fields?

The problem is not returning to leftist heritage as a living critical method and benefiting from it accordingly, but when that heritage and old organizational mechanisms turn into rigid standards, texts above reality, or substitutes for field evaluation, research, organization, and development. At that point, we become, unintentionally, like an institution clinging to outdated methods because they succeeded once, ignoring that conditions of success have changed, then wondering why the masses seek other alternatives, even poor ones.

4. Restoring the Scientific Method as the Core of Leftist Thought

The lesson here is not to glorify capitalism or adopt its values, but to benefit from its scientific method of evaluation in identifying our own weaknesses. The fundamental challenge lies in borrowing the tool, scientific, analytical, and marketing methodology, while rejecting the spirit of individual profit, domination, and class hegemony. This contradiction must be managed with strict awareness. The Iraqi left today needs this kind of evaluation and scientific rigor. It must conduct real surveys in working class neighborhoods, among manual and intellectual workers, in universities, workplaces, and among the unemployed, not to abandon its class horizon or its social change project, but to understand how its message reaches, how it is understood, where it breaks down, and where it turns into a heavy discourse detached from reality. It must study and measure the impact of its policies, statements, and activities, its presence on the ground and in digital space, the language of its discourse, its capacity to build real trust, and review its organizational and leadership forms while studying its actual audience. We must ask clearly: why are we not reaching? Why are we not influencing? Why do we not become a clear option? Only then can courageous political and organizational decisions be taken based on results. What matters is expansion, winning mass trust, and social change. This logic, though part of capitalist mechanisms, carries an important practical lesson: it relies on science, experimentation, and continuous review, not on slogans, good intentions, or history.

5. The Left in the Age of the Digital Revolution

In the context of the digital revolution, this need becomes even more urgent. We live in a time when ideas are measured by reach, impact, interaction, and the ability to turn into collective action. These are criteria understood by younger generations and practiced daily in digital space and on the ground. Young manual and intellectual workers do not receive politics through long speeches or heavy theoretical texts, but through platforms, short videos, open discussions, horizontal and flexible forms of organization, and collective leadership. Political, administrative, organizational sciences, development, and digital space must be treated as real arenas of class struggle and used effectively, as this is a basic condition for building a contemporary left capable of transforming social anger into organized force.

In this sense, leftist ideas become a living analytical tool at the heart of the digital revolution, continuously evolving rather than frozen in timeless texts. Young women and men shift from being a target audience to becoming essential actors in political, intellectual, and organizational production. When the left succeeds in linking the justice of its social project with scientific development, as Marx and Engels once did, but now with digital tools, it can represent social change as a clear and convincing alternative, move from fragmentation to organized collective action, break the hegemony of political capitalism, and build a new emancipatory horizon.

6. Why Do We Need a Broad and Unified Leftist Framework in Iraq

The Iraqi left is not merely one party or a group of organizations, but a broad emotional, intellectual, and social current deeply rooted in Iraqi society. This current, across all its factions, played an important historical role in struggling for the rights of manual and intellectual workers, promoting leftist and civic values, equality, women’s rights, and minority rights, and had a strong political and social presence in modern Iraqi history. This honorable history and these great sacrifices place a greater responsibility on us today: not to settle for celebrating the past, but to confront reality as it is, without evasion or justification. The Iraqi left faces a difficult situation manifested in continuous decline, growing mass isolation, and especially a clear distance from younger generations. The average age of current leadership often ranges between sixty and seventy, which calls, with full respect for their experiences and sacrifices, for opening space to younger generations who live a different reality, within a framework of integration between experience and renewal. Despite positive attempts to strengthen the role of youth and women, their presence remains limited in shaping general policies and they do not lead the scene as required, particularly in the digital age where forms of organization, leadership, and communication have radically changed.

Given this reality, it is no longer sufficient to merely diagnose the crisis. It becomes necessary to search for new tools of thinking and action. If our capitalist class enemy continuously rebuilds itself through analysis, experimentation, correction, reorganization, and keeping pace with development, then remaining fragmented and captive to old forms of discourse and organization weakens our chances of influence and change. Thus, the call for a broad and unified leftist framework becomes a practical response to crisis and a historical necessity, and an urgent need for a qualitative shift in thinking, organization, and action to create positive impact in Iraqi society.

7. Global Experiences of Unity and Joint Action Among Left Forces

Here it is useful to learn from global experiences that worked on the idea of a unified leftist framework, not as readymade recipes, but as organizational and practical lessons open to critical benefit, showing how managing differences and working around common ground can become a major source of strength.

·         In Denmark, the Red Green Alliance was formed in 1989 to unify the left by merging three Marxist parties with a broad base of independents. The striking and inspiring fact is that none of these parties had parliamentary representation before unification and were unable individually to pass the electoral threshold. Through unity and flexible organization based on branches and networks rather than heavy bureaucracy, they broke this blockade and became a relatively influential parliamentary force, repeatedly winning first place in Copenhagen. In recent municipal elections, they strengthened their position as the fifth largest party nationally with 7.1 percent of the vote, proving that unity of parliamentary zeros can produce a significant force when will and tools exist.

·         In Germany, Die Linke was founded in 2007 through the merger of two main currents from East and West, achieving a historic unification that doubled parliamentary results and unified a large segment of the electoral and social left under one framework, despite complex internal contradictions.

·         In Portugal, the Left Bloc was formed in 1999 through the merger of several left currents. It represents a model that preserves the intellectual and organizational independence of founding currents within a broader structure with a shared electoral goal, allowing it to enhance bargaining power and enter government formation through parliamentary support for the first time.

·         In Spain, Podemos, founded in 2014, relied on digital platforms and horizontal organization to integrate activists, social movements, and intellectuals, challenging traditional party structures. This model demonstrated the left’s capacity to use modern tools to rapidly form a radical and inclusive political force, rising from nothing to the third largest parliamentary force within a few years.

·         In Colombia, the Historic Pact achieved an unprecedented breakthrough. It was not a fleeting electoral alliance, but a solid coalition including Marxist parties, environmental movements, feminist organizations, and forces representing Indigenous and Afro Colombian communities. The Colombian left understood that division is a gift to the right, built this framework, and succeeded in bringing Gustavo Petro to the presidency in 2022. The experience was marked by militant pragmatism, shifting discourse from complex ideological slogans to issues directly affecting people’s lives, such as climate justice, food sovereignty, and rights of marginalized groups, and using digitalization and artificial intelligence to reach youth alienated from traditional politics.

·         In Brazil, the Federation Brazil of Hope stands as a leading example of political tactics. After years of decline and judicial and political attacks, the Workers’ Party did not retreat into nostalgia but recognized that confronting the far right required building a broad progressive left bloc. It restored alliances with labor unions while expanding to include land movements, environmental defenders, and even sectors of the bourgeois and political center harmed by chaos. The key lesson is that the left regained power in 2022 through inclusive alliances, presenting itself as a defender of democracy and institutions, and skillfully using digital communication to break right wing dominance over social media.

·         In Chile, the Approve Dignity coalition, formed from a broad front of left organizations and protest movements, succeeded in bringing Gabriel Boric to power in 2021 as the youngest president in the country’s history. Yet Chile also offers a harsh lesson with the left’s loss of the presidency in December 2025, requiring critical review of mechanisms for maintaining mass trust. Nonetheless, the unified coalition structure prevented fragmentation after leaving power, enabling a solid and organized opposition.

What unites these experiences is the recognition that the left can no longer act effectively as isolated parties, but as flexible coalitions capable of managing differences and linking politics with immediate social demands of manual and intellectual workers. These lessons are not transferred mechanically to Iraq, but they open a practical horizon for building a broad and unified Iraqi left framework suited to contemporary conditions.

8. Foundations and Mechanisms of a Unified Leftist Framework, A Scientific Roadmap

After diagnosing the crisis of tools and organizational fragmentation, and drawing lessons from successful global models, thinking in shared practical paths becomes unavoidable. A roadmap can be proposed to establish a unified Iraqi left framework that gathers all left and progressive forces around common ground and a minimum agreed program, with clear democratic mechanisms and enhanced leadership roles for youth and women.

A.      This includes holding a general conference for all factions and personalities of the Iraqi and Kurdistan left to discuss building a unified organizational framework across Iraq including the Kurdistan Region, encompassing left and progressive parties, unions, mass organizations, and allowing individual activists to join, recognizing the large number of leftists outside existing frameworks, while guaranteeing individual and organizational membership under clear rules.

B.      A unified minimum program should be drafted, focused on achievable short-term goals, clear and direct, centered on the interests of manual and intellectual workers, development of basic services, social justice, equality, job creation, full women’s rights, neutrality of religion from the state, and protection of freedoms. It should be written in contemporary, accessible language, linked to a scientific action plan subject to measurement and evaluation.

C.      The framework should adopt a simple, comprehensible name such as Bread and Freedom Alliance, avoiding traditional leftist labels that no longer attract broad sectors.

D.      It should rely on collective rotational leadership, flexible organizational rules, multiple forms of membership, openness to platforms and currents within the framework, and readiness of founding entities to restructure and reduce rigid centralism to grant real authority to collective leadership.

E.       Wide decentralization by provinces, regions, and professional bodies should be emphasized, alongside critical review of ethnic based divisions within the Iraqi left, seeking forms more consistent with unity of class struggle.

F.       Effective use of modern sciences in leadership, management, organization, media, digitalization, and policy evaluation should be adopted, with feedback from the masses as a core decision mechanism.

G.      Youth leadership should be strengthened through binding organizational rules such as quotas for youth and women with real authority. Renewal is not achieved by slogans but by rules that produce it.

H.      A scientific, digital media policy should treat digital space as a real arena of class struggle, including multi-platform media, local content teams, digital training, precise use of artificial intelligence, and scientific tools to measure impact and reach, reconnecting the left with youth.

I.         The decisive condition for success is the ability to work on common ground and contain differences positively without turning the framework into a battlefield. One framework, multiple platforms, shared language, and modern tools can transform the Iraqi left from scattered islands into an organized social force.

9. In Conclusion, Will We Continue Interpreting the World While Our Enemies Change It

The decisive question today is not intentions, but action. Does the left present alternatives grounded in what is socially and class wise possible and achievable within existing balances, through cumulative gradual change, or does it merely raise theoretically correct slogans without tangible impact on people’s lives?

Ultimately, the crisis of the Iraqi left is not one of sincerity, history, organizations, or specific leaders, but of tools and modes of work in a world where conditions of politics, organization, and struggle have fundamentally changed. Scientific development and digital transformations have redrawn spaces of influence and power. Those who ignore them exit the equation and lose the ability to transform from an isolated voice into an effective mass force.

We do not need a new left in values, but a new left in discourse, action, and organizational mechanisms, one that translates thought into concrete changes without abandoning the essence of its socialist project. Without this methodological transformation, the left will continue interpreting the world with old wisdom while its more organized enemies change it with new tools.

The answer to this challenge will determine whether the Iraqi left remains a bright memory or becomes an active force shaping the future. Scientific methodology and global experiences confirm that decline is not destiny, but the result of tools no longer aligned with the stage’s requirements and organizational structures that have lost vitality. Courage today lies not in slogans, but in dismantling rigid structures, abandoning narrow centralism, and building a broad, flexible, unified framework capable of reconnecting organization with living reality.

The final question remains open in arenas of struggle and protest: do we, as a left, truly possess the readiness to undertake this renewal, transcend historical constraints, abandon narrow frameworks and traditional leadership patterns, open to reality, unite, and build a force capable of improving the lives of the masses?

We face a decisive choice: either take the path of renewal and practical unity to restore our role as an effective force for change, or continue on the current path and risk further decline and being overtaken by history. Global experiences offer hope that change is achievable and demonstrate that unity is not only possible but effective, even under the harshest conditions and deepest differences. A left that withstood decades of dictatorship and repression surely has the courage today to repair its tools, renew its intellectual and organizational vitality, and stand with its masses.

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Notes

–          The Iraqi left consists of several parties and organizations, most notably the Iraqi Communist Party, the Kurdistan Communist Party, the Iraqi Worker Communist Party, the Kurdistan Worker Communist Party, the Alternative Communist Organization, the Communist Left Party, in addition to other formations.

–          None of the leftist and progressive lists that participated in the November 2025 Iraqi parliamentary elections won any seats.Email