Ibrahim al-Jaafari will struggle to get Kurdish backing for his bid to stay on as Iraqi prime minister despite a two-day visit to drum up support for his campaign, a senior Kurdish official said on Tuesday.
The official said Jaafari's visit, which ended on Monday, failed to improve his strained relations with Kurds, who accuse him of monopolising power and failing to honour the deals he made to win Kurdish support the first time he took office.
"The visit was designed to melt the ice between us," said the official from the Kurdish Alliance, the second biggest bloc in the current Iraqi parliament.
"But it will be very difficult for Jaafari to get Kurdish support," said the official, who declined to be named. "We have strong reservations about him and the way he ran the government.
"We also have reservations about the way he deals with Kurdish demands."
Jaafari is head of one of the two main parties in the Shia Islamist coalition that dominated the December 15 election and is set to be the biggest bloc in the new parliament.
On paper, the bloc has the constitutional right to nominate a prime minister. Alliance sources have said their nomination will either be Jaafari or Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi.
Whoever gets the nomination will still have to win parliamentary approval and, as the Shia alliance is likely to fall short of an overall majority, will have to find support from other parties.
Without Kurdish backing, Jaafari is vulnerable to mounting support within his own Shia Alliance coalition for Mahdi.
Ultimately, the choice of prime minister will be part of an elaborate package deal worked out by four or more blocs now engaged in preliminary negotiations on a grand coalition.
The official said Kurdish leaders are unimpressed by Jaafari's record in government over the past eight months.
In particular, they do not believe Jaafari, a Shia Islamist from southern Iraq, has done enough to support their claim to the oil-rich northern city of Kirkuk, which the Kurds want as the future capital of an autonomous region.
Jaafari wound up his visit to Kurdistan on Monday by meeting Iraq's Kurdish president Jalal Talabani.
At a news conference afterwards, Talabani said the two men had buried their differences and that he had no objection to Jaafari heading the new government.