MESOP : THE POLITICAL & STRUCTURAL DILEMMA OF PUK / PUK has to get over its leadership problem

By Arian Mufid: Kurdistan Tribune – 11 June 2015 – For the last four decades Jalal Talabani dominated his PUK (Patriotic Union of Kurdistan) party. His illness and stroke left the PUK without a leader and there is a fear that they will never find one to match him. The PUK is haunted by its success and good ratings in many previous years.

Many of its members and leaders struggled and some sacrificed their lives in the armed struggle. The PUK once controlled almost the whole of south Kurdistan, but now it does not even have a majority in the Suli area. In 2009 there was a political earthquake when the PUK lost 25 seats in Suli to the breakaway Gorran movement. The evidence of the party’s crisis is glaring in this, the year of the PUK’s 40th anniversary. PUK leaders Barham Saleh and Kosrat Rasul are in two different camps and Talabani’s wife Hero Ahmed is in another camp. The PUK’s defeat in the 2013 parliamentary elections showed that too many people had abandoned it. However the party has not had a serious debate about the kind of leadership it needs and how it might regain the momentum it has enjoyed in the past. The solution coming up from the grassroots, which knows that the root of this problem is the leadership itself, is that the PUK needs to return to its ascendant years.

The task for PUK now is to place itself on a metaphorical couch and sort the issues out, once and for all. It will require analysis of the primary problem which, in my opinion, is that the most of the current PUK leadership is out of touch, with exception of a few such as Barham Saleh who have some vision for the party’s future. The PUK needs to separate what Jalal Talabani got right from what he got wrong. This sounds straightforward, but too many in the PUK can no longer even see credit column of the Talabani leadership. The PUK needs to learn from experiences worldwide showing that, if it continues to operate without leadership, it could become the smallest party in Kurdistan. Until the PUK gets its over leadership problem, it will remain out of power, unsullied perhaps, but not very influential.

There are two options for the party it can either go into further decline or it can regain the impetus of the early 2000s when it was well rooted among ordinary people. The PUK needs a new conference which can elect new leadership and revise the programme of the party to embrace the challenges it faces.