Iraq’s PM Zaidi sets aside Tuesday cabinet session for 2027 budget

BAGHDAD — Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi on Saturday set aside the cabinet’s Tuesday session for the draft 2027 federal budget so that it can be approved and sent to parliament, his spokesperson said.

The draft ties spending allocations to target results and includes financing tools to support economic development and the country’s ability to deal with risks and challenges, government spokesperson Haider al-Aboudi told the state-run Iraqi News Agency.

The Development Road project, a planned transport corridor from Grand Faw Port to the Turkish border, and the Generations Fund, a sovereign wealth fund Zaidi proposed in his government program, are among the budget’s strategic priorities, Aboudi said. He gave no figures for either.

The draft has been with the cabinet since Sept. 27, when the Ministerial Council for Economy approved it. It will reach parliament on Nov. 15, a month after its legal deadline, Finance Committee chair Uday Awad said on Oct. 26.

Earlier on Saturday, Kurdistan Democratic Party lawmakers and a federal ministerial committee led by Deputy Prime Minister Mohammed Ali Tamim, who heads the Ministerial Council for Economy, agreed that the draft needs political consensus to secure the rights of all Iraqis, the party’s parliamentary bloc said.

Erbil and Baghdad are at odds over the draft. The Kurdistan Regional Government wants the Kurdistan Region’s share of the budget based on 14.14% of Iraq’s population, the figure it takes from the 2024 census, and rejected a federal figure of 12.68% in September, according to KRG cabinet statements. On Oct. 28, the KRG cabinet asked the federal cabinet not to let the bill go to a vote in its current form.

The draft’s figures have also drawn criticism. It projects record revenue of more than 174 trillion dinars (about $115 billion at the official rate) on unrealistic assumptions about oil exports and non-oil income, economist Nabil al-Marsoumi said Sunday.

The draft assumes exports of 4 million barrels a day at $58 a barrel, against about 3 million now, Marsoumi wrote on Facebook. “Oil revenues are built on a barrel that does not exist,” he wrote. Oil Minister Basim al-Abadi has given a higher figure for exports: more than 3.4 million barrels a day in October.

Oil provides more than 90% of federal revenue. Iraq has had no budget law this year. Since the three-year law covering 2023 to 2025 expired, spending has been governed by the one-twelfth rule, under which monthly spending is capped at one-twelfth of the previous year’s actual current spending while there is no budget law.