As things turned out, of the 59 percent of registered voters' turnout, which amounted to 8.5 million citizens, the UIA list of candidates received 48.1 percent of the vote, as opposed to 25.7 percent of the Kurd alliance, and 13.8 percent for incumbent interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's group.
In Iraq's proportional representation system under the US-imposed interim Constitution, this would translate out as 132 seats for the UIA, 71 for the Kurds, and 38 for Allawi's faction. After the initial distribution of seats though, since only 12 party lists reached the threshold for representation in the National Assembly, the remaining seats left over (approximately eight) would also likely go to the UIA.
This would give the Shia alliance 140 seats, two more than a simple majority in the House of 275. Even if the UIA makes the 140 seats mark, it will, for good political reasons, have to accommodate the Kurds who hold the balance of bargaining power in the Assembly, and the alienated former ruling group of the Sunnis, who largely boycotted the elections, if Iraq is to remain intact and prosper.
Ayatollah Sistani has already offered the olive branch to the Sunnis, and there are reports of discussions between the UIA and unnamed Sunni representatives. The Kurds, after decades of fighting Baghdad for their rights, seem poised to achieve the autonomy within a federal Iraq they have sought for so long, with their own regional Assembly.
The issue of what sort of polity post-elections Iraq will be depends largely on how the present jockeying for position and turf pans out.
The UIA and the Kurds have already put forward their candidates for high office. From the UIA, there is competition for the post of prime minister between the finance minister in the outgoing government Adel Abdul Mahdi and incumbent Vice President Ibrahim Jaafari.
The Kurds are aiming at trading the position of largely ceremonial president for their leader Jalal Talabani plus some seats in the government against their support for the UIA's prime ministerial candidate. Allawi has been attempting to woo the Kurds and exploit any fissures in the UIA to retain his job, but he is unlikely to succeed.
The coming to power of a Shia-Kurd combine in Iraq has proved troubling to the US and especially to Iraq's neighbours. Arab Sunni states fear the rise of another Shia power in close proximity to Iran, with the perceived corollary that Tehran would influence Baghdad's policies.
Turkey, and to some extent Iran, are uneasy at the prospect of the nationalist Kurds acquiring the kind of power they seem poised to in Iraq. Both Turkey and Iran fear their own Kurds would be emboldened in seeking their long denied rights.
Any failure of the UIA and Iraqi Kurds to strike a power sharing and governance compact that meets the necessary two-thirds approval of the National Assembly could fuel Kurd separatism, and act as a model for the Turkish and Irani Kurds.
While the UIA will insist on the territorial integrity of a federal Iraqi state, the secular Kurds could restrain the Shias from implementing any design to nudge Iraq in the direction of an Islamic state. Each side will have to trim its sails if they are to stay together and work together.
Despite the elections having been carried out in the shadow of the guns of the occupying forces, Sistani has calculated well that any relatively free and fair election in Iraq was bound to give the long denied Shia majority its due place in the Iraqi sun.
The Kurds too saw their golden chance and have played their cards well. What remains is to see whether the next steps required go well. These steps include the appointment of a president and two vice presidents who have to be approved by the National Assembly by a two-thirds majority.
This three-man council will then nominate a prime minister who will form a cabinet, all of which will again have to be approved by the National Assembly, but this time by a simple majority. Following that comes the task of constitution making, by no means a smooth or simple task given the contending political ideologies, Islamic and secular, that will vie for space in post-elections Iraq.
Despite all these impending difficulties, Iraq has definitely turned a historic corner and the reverberations of its tectonic political shifts will be felt throughout the region.