On Bafel Talabani’s Dishonesty and Blatant Flip-Flopping
It’s interesting to watch, but the Barzanis have been far more consistent from their 2024 election campaign until now than the Talabanis:
The issue with Bafel Talabani is that he has a very strange and twisted idea about what election campaign noise means and how tone should shift post-election. He thinks he’s replicating a Western political culture, but he’s completely off the mark.
Of course, you can’t refuse to sit down with your rivals after an election—especially when that’s the only path to government formation. But the way Bafel is going about it shows blatant disrespect to the voters who backed his party, and reflects a very warped understanding of what campaign energy and post-election negotiations are supposed to represent.
More dangerously, if you look at the long-form interview Bafel recently gave to his party’s media, he clearly comes across as someone with an inferiority complex. We’ll do a separate post on this, but just to highlight a couple of things: he bragged about having an American friend who’s a competitive shooter, claimed that “two Americans told him he’ll be a great leader” as if it were some kind of divine revelation, dismissed the importance of Kurdish social media, yet proudly mentioned that same shooter friend is a YouTuber. There’s more here, but it deserves a separate post.
He seems to be viewing Western-style political campaigning—where some rhetorical flexibility is expected—as a justification for completely flipping positions in a way that’s incoherent and disingenuous. But what he’s doing isn’t clever political maneuvering; it’s just reckless and dishonest.
Even if you play into campaign noise, you shouldn’t do it in a way that leaves no room to maneuver later—where you say something so extreme or specific that any reversal becomes outright humiliation. And that’s exactly what he’s doing.
Take the MyAccount salary issue as an example: he is outright lying and treating people like fools. He now claims he didn’t even know about MyAccount during the election campaign and that the Prime Minister had to send a team afterward to explain it to him. But that’s absurd—his own brother is the Deputy Prime Minister. And if he truly didn’t understand it, why did he attack it during the campaign with slogans like “It’s not MyAccount or Your Account—it’s Masrour’s Account”? Either he was lying then or he’s lying now. And if it’s the former, then his current backtracking only makes it worse. It’s not just a U-turn; it’s an insult to voters’ intelligence.
Again, this all seems rooted in his deep insecurity and need for external validation, which shows through in almost everything he says and does.