Only slightly more than 50% of eligible Iraqi voters participated in provincial elections on Saturday, a far cry from the 72% turnout for the latest such elections, in 2009, according to Iraq’s Independent High Electoral Commission. In Iraq’s capital, turnout slipped to 33%, the commission said.
Preliminary results will be announced on Wednesday, officials said.
The lower participation rate reflects growing disillusionment with a political process that U.S.-led forces spent hundreds of billions of dollars and lost thousands of lives to help establish, voters and analysts said.
Sixteen months after the last coalition forces departed, many Iraqis say they feel left out by a political dialogue they say is sectarian and corrupt. Some say Iraq seems to be sliding backwards into authoritarian rule.
“It’s show business. The Iraqi people are sick of it,” said Haider Al Amily, 27 years old, a Baghdad physician who said he and all of his friends are searching for ways to emigrate. “I’ve voted every time, but this is the first time that I didn’t go. All the educated people didn’t go.”
Saturday’s local elections were watched partially as a metric of whether Iraq’s still-nascent political institutions and security forces could handle managing nationwide polls. By most accounts it seemed to have succeeded on that measure.
The government took extreme security precautions, forbidding motorists from streets throughout the day, even far away from polling stations. Security forces voted a week earlier so that Iraq could deploy their numbers in full on Saturday.
Several small bomb blasts at polling spots caused a handful of injuries across the country. But such is the level of violence in Iraq that those events were seen by many outside observers and Iraqi government officials as minor setbacks.
In the week that preceded the vote, dozens of people were killed in a rash of attacks. But many Iraqis said recent spats of violence had little affect on voter turnout, as Iraqis have become accustomed to terrorism.
Instead, many nonvoting Iraqis said they avoided Saturday’s polls—the eighth since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003—because their ballot papers are beginning to seem like less meaningful agents of change.
Many Iraqis such as Mr. Al Amily complained that the same politicians dominate the political landscape regardless of vote results.
Even after the more pluralistic, Sunni-leaning Iraqiyya list chalked up a slight victory during parliamentary elections in 2010, the party was effectively neutralized during Iraq’s arduous search for a compromise prime minister. Nouri Al Maliki, who eventually took that role, has presided over the Iraqi government for seven years and is set to vie for a third term next year.
“Elections are happening, but politics in Iraq remains stuck in a time warp,” said Ramzy Mardini, a fellow at the Iraq Institute for Strategic Studies. “The fact that these elections are taking place means very little for Iraqi democracy.”
Mr. Maliki and his colleagues hope that if his State of Law coalition wins the provincial elections, the victory will help them rally support ahead of parliamentary elections in 2014.
With enough votes, the coalition could lead Iraq’s government without having to compromise with the country’s increasingly disaffected Sunni-backed minority.
“If he underperforms in the provincial elections, not many are going to jump on his wagon. Many will jump off,” said Mr. Mardini of Mr. Maliki. “He needs that inevitability more than anybody.”
With so much at stake, Iraqi politicians appear to have moved toward the sectarian extremes, alienating more moderate Sunni and Shiite voters who want to see the two sects cooperate.
“Sectarianism remains the dominant brand in political fashion,” said Mr. Mardini. “Many Iraqis are dissatisfied with sectarianism but when it comes to voting they have no other choice. They’re fearful of the other side dominating.”
Even Saturday’s voting process showed the painful scars left by sectarian conflict. Two large Sunni-majority provinces in western Iraq were prevented from voting Saturday after the Shiite-dominated cabinet said anti-Maliki protests made holding the polls a security risk. Before the weekend vote, Mr. Maliki said the local elections in Anbar and Nenevah provinces would be postponed “until security is restored”—giving officials an opportunity to keep the current Maliki-aligned councils in place.
Mr. Maliki’s coalition, meanwhile, has included four new Shiite-backed parties in its coalition, including two strongly Shiite nationalist groups.
Politicians in Mr. Maliki’s party say that hostile sectarian rhetoric remains the dominant flavor in politics, particularly as violence in Syria escalates and Iran’s influence expands across Sunni-dominated western Iraq.
But many voters say the poisoned political waters will kill Iraq’s new political system before it even has a chance to survive.
“I don’t think there’s democracy here. Everything in the state is under the control of the parties,” said Osama Latif, 28, a dentist, who declined to vote on Saturday. “We’re headed back toward dictatorship.”