Tens of thousands of former students and their supporters took to the streets in Baghdad and other cities across Iraq May 18 to demand the newly formed government provide them jobs. While the unemployment rate in the oil-rich country is 13.5%, youth unemployment stands at 32%.
“We are told there are no jobs available,” Khalil Mohammed told Rudaw. “Yet hundreds and thousands of people have been hired in [government] institutions. How is that? Through money and bribery.”
Successive governments have utilized public-sector hiring to try to buy political loyalty and soften the impact of the ongoing capitalist crisis there. Government workers now make up 37% of the country’s workforce.
Hussein Ali, a graduate from Mosul University College of Agriculture and Forestry, has been without a job since graduating in 2021. “Every time we are told to wait for a new round of hiring without knowing when it will come,” he told Shafaq News. Similar protests have taken place in past years.
Farmers held protests in several areas a week earlier against government moves to cut the price it pays for wheat by up to a third, while the prices farmers are paying for fuel, fertilizer and seeds are soaring. They also demanded the immediate payment of government funds owed them from the last season.
A bloc of parties based among Shiite Muslims designated Ali al-Zaidi as prime minister April 27. Under the country’s sectarian constitution, cooked up under pressure from Washington after the 2003 U.S. war against Iraq, the prime minister must be a Shiite, the president Kurdish and the speaker of parliament a Sunni Muslim. Al-Zaidi’s appointment comes after President Donald Trump threatened to cut U.S. ties with Iraq if its parliament again selected former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who the U.S. rulers view as too closely aligned with Tehran.