The campaign was expected to focus on competition within the three main religious and ethnic communities: Shi'ite Arabs, Sunni Arabs and Kurds. While under the
Constitution of Iraq the head of the largest coalition has the first call to become
prime minister, in a precedent set following the 2010 election, a revised coalition can be formed following the election. This reduced the incentive for parties to form broad coalitions prior to the election. So in November 2011, Iraq's
Independent High Electoral Commission approved 276 political entities to run in the elections, including a number of coalitions. Shi'ite Arabs were split between the Prime Minister's
State of Law Coalition, the
Sadrist al-Ahrar Bloc, and the
Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq backed
al-Muwatin coalition. The former secular, non-sectarian
Iraqiya bloc – 2010 the strongest force elected into parliament – had broken apart into
Usama al-Nujayfi's Sunni
regionalist Muttahidoon coalition,
Ayad Allawi's National Coalition
al-Wataniya, and
Saleh al-Mutlaq's
al-Arabiya Coalition. And the two prominent Kurdish parties,
Masoud Barzani's
Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and
Jalal Talabani's
Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), were joined by a third Kurdish party, the
Movement for Change (Gorran) headed by
Nawshirwan Mustafa. ==Conduct==