Five months after winning confidence, al-Zaidi is still assembling his cabinet
Parliament approved only 14 of 23 ministers in May. The deals being cut now to fill the rest are expanding the government that was meant to be reformed.
Ali Falih Kadhim al-Zaidi was sworn in on 14 May 2026, after parliament granted confidence to his ministerial programme — and, in the same sitting, approved only 14 of his 23 cabinet nominees, failing to reach consensus on the rest. The Congressional Research Service, in its updated Iraq primer IF10404, records him flatly as a “Shia Arab businessman” and “a newcomer to government” who was “the nominee of the Coordination Framework.” Al Jazeera, reporting the vote, carried the formal wording from the prime minister’s media office: “The Council of Representatives votes to grant confidence to the government of Prime Minister Ali Faleh Al-Zaidi and its ministerial programme.” Al-Zaidi had been named premier-designate on or about 28 April, after months of stalemate; Al Jazeera at the time described him as a multimillionaire, and both AP and the New York Times framed him as a businessman rather than a party figure.
The National reported on 7 October that completing the government has cost al-Zaidi four newly created deputy positions and a post for a son-in-law — the paper’s own characterisation; the individual is not named in the published account. Its framing is that a prime minister chosen as a compromise must now pay the blocs that nominated him, enlarging a government Iraqis already regard as too big, too expensive and too familial. Three days earlier, the state Iraqi News Agency carried a line from the National Political Council, a party-political convening forum with no constitutional standing, saying that “understandings related to the formation of the government had been completed.” That is an announcement, not a confirmation, and variants of it have been made before during this process. The UK House of Commons Library, refreshing its Iraq briefing on 10–11 October, noted that London welcomed the government’s formation in May as “significant.”
Assessment: The reform test for this government was never its programme; it was whether the Coordination Framework could seat a cabinet without paying for each chair. Five months of vacancies answer that. Deputy premierships are the cheapest currency in Iraqi politics because they cost the nominating bloc nothing and the treasury a great deal, and every one created now is a permanent line in a budget the same parliament will be asked to defend. Treat “understandings completed” as a negotiating position published through the state wire, not as a count of confirmed ministers. The number to watch is not announcements but votes: 14 of 23, and what parliament actually ratifies next.