In final pitch, Maliki makes emphatic case

He defended his government’s successes, while acknowledging its failures. He criticized members of parliament as contentious, conniving, and ineffective, even, in some cases, sympathetic to militants. He pleaded almost plaintively for Iraqis to appreciate how far the country had come since its darkest days and the sheer difficulty of governing a divided country at war.

“I would like to ask, were things going smoothly two years ago?’’ he said at a rare and lengthy news conference. “I want to say we have not achieved everything, but we have achieved some things.’’

Maliki spoke two days ahead of a crucial vote for the government that will be in power as US forces withdraw. That the outcome remained unclear on the last official day of campaigning makes it perhaps the most competitive democratic contest for power held in the Middle East.

The short election campaign - delayed by disputes over the rules and the disqualification of hundreds of candidates, and muted by the risk of violence against candidates - seemed to reach its greatest intensity yesterday. There were large rallies in Baghdad, Friday prayers in mosques across the country, and a flurry of televised appeals by leaders of the major blocs.

Thousands of supporters of the main Shi’ite-led coalition challenging Maliki, the Iraqi National Alliance, gathered outside the home of one of its leaders, Ammar al-Hakim.

Hakim, though not a candidate, delivered a sermon to what amounted to the largest campaign rally so far. The turnout there, as well as that at mosques around the country on the last Friday prayers before the vote, underscored the potency of the country’s religious Shi’ites. Hakim told the crowd it was their religious duty to vote and made a populist appeal that obliquely criticized Maliki as a leader out of touch with the country’s needs.

A day after a series of attacks struck polling stations that opened early to allow soldiers and police officers to vote, killing at least 12 people in Baghdad, there were no reports of significant violence yesterday.

Iraqi election officials announced that turnout in the early voting reached 59 percent. The highest was 87 percent in Erbil, one of the three Kurdish provinces, and the lowest was in the western half of Baghdad, where two of the attacks on Thursday occurred and only 42 percent of those eligible voted.

The main militant group, the Islamic State of Iraq, has vowed to disrupt the election, and the low turnout in Baghdad suggested that violence could scare voters away from the polls.

Iraqis living abroad also began to vote yesterday in 16 countries, including the United States.

Ayad Allawi, a former interim prime minister who leads the most formidable coalition trying to unseat Maliki, complained about irregularities in the early voting. He also criticized what he called a government campaign against members of his bloc, called Iraqiya.

Maliki defended the security agreement that set a deadline for the withdrawal of US troops by saying it was a transparent agreement, unlike those that govern a US military presence in six other Arab countries. He also said the ultimate benefit of the American invasion in 2003 was “beyond question’’ because it ended Saddam Hussein’s repressive rule.