ERBIL, Kurdistan Region of Iraq – Iraq’s draft 2027 budget, which has raised Kurdish concerns, remains open to change, a Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) lawmaker told The New Region on Monday, a day after a spokesperson said that the party would not vote for the draft.

On Sunday, Danar Abdulghaffar, spokesperson for the KDP's bloc in the federal parliament, said it would not vote on the disputed draft budget, voicing that it is “not fair” and fails to consider Kurdish constitutional rights.

Sipan Sherwani, a KDP lawmaker in Baghdad, told The New Region that the draft is still in its early stages and that “there are negotiations which our delegations are part of and many things are susceptible to change.”

“Let's not get ahead of the developments,” he said, adding: “There is still a chance to establish the constitutional rights of the Kurdish people in it.”

Erbil has insisted that its share of the budget be based on its population size, put at 14.14 percent. In mid-September, Kurdistan Region Prime Minister Masrour Barzani said anything less than that would be considered “unfair”.

According to unconfirmed reports, Baghdad has allocated the usual 12.67 percent in the current draft.

On Wednesday, Farhad Atrushi, second deputy speaker of the Iraqi parliament, told The New Region that the current draft has “bad things for the Kurdistan Region.”

Atrushi added that there are many “strange” points in the draft relating to the Kurdistan Region, especially in terms of “punitive” measures he claimed Baghdad could impose on Erbil should the latter not accept its demands.

The current draft is similar to the three-year budget passed in 2023, “which everyone knows was very problematic for Kurdish people,” Sherwani said, calling it “the worst in Iraq’s history.”

The Kurdistan Region had more rights in the 2021 budget, when it did not have to hand over revenue to Baghdad and sold its oil independently, he added.

“Not only does it [the current draft] not solve disputes between Erbil and Baghdad, but the problems that were solved will all return,” the lawmaker warned.

In late September, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) also accused Baghdad of not counting 500,000 displaced people hosted by the Region, while also cutting disputed areas out of the census.

The lack of provision of funds for public sector workers in the Kurdistan Region has also been a recurring issue, with the Iraqi government suspending salaries in May based on the claim that Erbil had used up its share of the annual budget.

Late last month, KRG Finance Minister Awat Sheikh Janab told The New Region that the Region has not received even seven percent of Iraq’s annual budget in a single year since 2014, despite consistently being allocated 12.67 percent of the total allocation.