ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq - The Iraqi parliament on Saturday night lifted its session dedicated to electing a new parliamentary speaker with no candidate making the cut to be elected new speaker of the house.

The Saturday session was expected to decide who will become the new speaker of the Iraqi parliament, however none of the candidates met the 166 votes required to be elected and the vote required a second round to decide.

In the first round of the vote, the Sunni Taqadum party candidate Shaalan Karim emerged gaining the most votes, however with just 152 votes and 14 votes short of the minimum required, he was not able to replace his party’s leader as the speaker of the parliament.

While the parliament took a break and was supposed to start a new round of voting, the session was unexpectedly lifted after deputy speaker and current acting speaker Muhsin al-Mandalawi added an extra item to the agenda, which was to give more authority to the speaker’s two deputies and shift power from the speaker only to their deputies as well.

Former parliamentary speaker and head of the Taqaddum bloc Mohammed al-Halbousi was stripped of his position in November after the Iraqi Federal Supreme Court revoked his parliamentary membership as a result of a lawsuit accusing Halbousi of forging a resignation paper.

Following the court’s ruling, Halbousi accused the court of violating the Iraqi constitution with their decision, stating that the court had no authority to make such a decision.

Soon after the decision, Halbousi’s 37 seats-strong party announced they would withdraw from the parliament.

However for someone like Halbousi, who is perhaps the most powerful Sunni leader who emerged in Iraq since 2003, withdrawing from parliament would have meant letting go of the majority Sunni influence he had gained after being the governor of the Sunni province of Anbar.

Halbousi was the first Sunni leader to be elected for two terms in a row as parliamentary speaker following the 2003 US invasion, therefore his popularity within the Sunni public is much more than any Sunni politician preceding him.

With the date and time of the new speaker’s election still unclear following Saturday’s session, the Shia Coordination Framework currently leads both the parliament and the government, leaving the Sunni component somehow out of the picture.