People's Party (Iraq)
People's Party حزب الشعب | |
|---|---|
| Leader | Faiq Al Sheikh Ali[1] |
| Founded | 2011 |
| Headquarters |
Baghdad, Iraq London, United Kingdom |
| Ideology |
Iraqi nationalism Liberalism Secularism Reformism Third Way |
| Political position |
Centre Social: Centre-left Economic: Centre-right |
| National affiliation | Civil Democratic Alliance[2] |
| Seats in the Council of Representatives of Iraq: |
1 / 328 |
| Website | |
| Official Facebook Page | |
The People's Party (Arabic: حزب الشعب, Ḥizb Al-Sha'ab) is an Iraqi Civil Liberal political party founded in 2011.
The party is led by Faiq Al Sheikh Ali, an Iraqi secular politician, born in 1963 in the city of Najaf to a religious family. He, however has been a secular liberal throughout his life. He earned a Bachelor's degree in Law from the University of Baghdad, College of Law and Political Sciences in 1987 and became a lawyer in 1989. He has been a politician since then and took part in the Uprisings against Saddam Hussein and was forced to flee Iraq to Saudi Arabia in 1991. Al Sheikh Ali then left to the United Kingdom, where he lived in London since 1993. In London he took part in most meetings and conferences of the Iraqi opposition, the last being the London conference in December 2002.
More than 30 of his close relatives were killed by the regime during his opposition and in January 2002, the Iraqi regime forced his mother, two sisters and one of his younger brothers to denounce him on Iraq's satellite television in a 25-minute interview, after he took part in a debate on Al-Jazeera channel, December 2001 calling Saddam Hussein a terrorist and a butcher. Patrick Cockburn, on Saturday 23 March 2002 wrote an article about it in The Independent under 'Saddam parades families of exiled critics on TV'.
2014 Parliamentary Elections
The party participated in the April 2014 Iraqi parliamentary election, as part of the Civil Democratic Alliance which is an Iraqi political coalition formed by various liberal and civil figures. The party won one of the three seats of the coalition in Baghdad Governorate. It is represented by its leader, Faiq Al Sheikh Ali who gained 24,256 votes, arriving sixth out of seventy one winning candidates in Baghdad.