Baghdad schedules the vote that would finally complete al-Zaidi’s cabinet

Parliament has placed on its announced agenda a session for the evening of Thursday 15 October, at 7 p.m. Baghdad time, devoted exclusively to voting on candidates for deputy prime minister and on vacant and newly proposed ministerial posts. The session follows a written request from Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi to Speaker Haibat al-Halbousi proposing that date, which parliament accepted, according to Peregraf, which reported the letter’s contents on 13 October. One clause in that letter is the hinge of the whole arrangement: al-Zaidi wrote that the deputy prime ministers would draw no salaries and no financial allocations, and that no new appointments would accompany the posts. That is what makes four deputy premierships saleable as power-sharing rather than as payroll. The Files has not seen the full text of the letter.

The number of posts at stake comes from a single outlet. The New Arab, in a 13 October exclusive bylined Adel Al-Nawab from Baghdad, reported that Iraq’s parties had reached a final agreement with al-Zaidi covering nine outstanding ministries and four deputy prime ministers. Its named on-the-record source, Salah al-Kubaisi of the Sunni Sovereignty Alliance, confirmed that parliament would convene Thursday to complete the cabinet — not the figure of nine, nor the identities of the nominees. Shafaq News carried the same core claim a day earlier, on 12 October, attributed to an unnamed “informed political source.” The arithmetic does close: the Congressional Research Service records that al-Zaidi was sworn in in May 2026 after parliament approved his programme and 14 of 23 cabinet nominees. Crisis Group dates the investiture to 14 May 2026, 154 days before Thursday’s session.

Assessment: Watch quorum, not the agreement. Iraqi completion sessions fail on attendance far more often than on votes, and a deal announced by one outlet and one anonymous source is a bargaining position until the hands go up. The unpaid-deputy clause is the detail to file away: allocations of this kind are routinely restored once the posts are occupied, and the absence of a salary line does not mean the absence of a budget. Note also what the sequencing buys al-Halbousi — he convenes the vote that fills nine ministries while Sunni bargaining over provincial election timing is live. Even the prime minister’s name arrives in English in four transliterations; this government is still largely unwritten in the Western record.