President of the Kurdistan Region


The president of the Kurdistan Region is the head of state of the semi-autonomous Kurdistan Region in northern Iraq. They are part of the Kurdistan Presidency Council and commander-in-chief of the Peshmerga. The current president of Kurdistan Region is Nechirvan Barzani, who assumed office on 10 June 2019.

History

After the results of the 1992 parliamentary election, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan with both parties holding 50 out of 100 seats, chose to create a unity government unrecognized by Ba'athist Iraq.
The unity government collapsed in 1994 and caused the Iraqi Kurdish Civil War to break out that ended in 1998. This resulted in the establishment of two Kurdistan Regional Governments, a KDP-controlled one in Erbil and a PUK-controlled one in Sulaymaniyah, each with their own president.
After an official reconciliation between the KDP and PUK in October 2002, parliamentary elections were then held on 30 January 2005 and on 14 June 2005 the KDP-leader Masoud Barzani was sworn in by the parliament in as new president and Kosrat Rasul Ali as the new vice president. In 2009, the system was then changed to elect the president and on 25 July 2009 presidential elections were held resulting in Barzani's re-election. On 29 October 2017, amidst the 2017 Iraqi–Kurdish conflict, Barzani announced his intentions to step down as president on November 1st.

Election results

2009 Kurdistan Region presidential election
--
CandidatePopular votesPercentage
Massoud Barzani1,266,39769.6
Kamal Mirawdily460,32325.3
Halow Ibrahim Ahmed63,3773.5
Ahmed Mohammed Rasul18,8901.4
Hussein Garmiyani10,6650.6
Total1,819,652 100%