The Iraqi Election Commission has scheduled tomorrow April 26th as the final date for the Gorran (Change) Movement’s long-delayed leadership conference. This gathering, aimed at resolving a bitter internal dispute, will determine the future control of a party that once reshaped Kurdish politics with its reformist agenda. The conference will be held under the Commission’s supervision after months of escalating tensions and competing claims to legitimacy.

Context: The Gorran Movement, once a transformative force in Kurdish politics, is now a shadow of its former self, paralyzed by factional infighting and public disillusionment. At the heart of the current crisis is a leadership struggle between two rival factions: one aligned with the sons of Gorran’s late founder, Nawshirwan Mustafa, and another operating from a separate headquarters, challenging their claim.

Earlier this month, on April 5, the Mustafa-aligned faction unilaterally held its own leadership conference in Sulaimani. However, the attempt to portray the conference as officially recognized collapsed when it was revealed that no representatives from Iraq’s election commission were present—rendering the proceedings legally void under Iraq’s political party laws.

The rival faction declined to recognize the April 5 conference and instead awaited the Commission’s intervention. To resolve the dispute, the Election Commission has now imposed a strict framework: a neutral venue has been selected in Sulaimani, and only the 2,130 founding members registered in 2017 are eligible to participate. The faction that succeeds in mobilizing the greater number of these members will control the voting outcome, electing a 41-member leadership council, five reserve members, and the General Coordinator.

Gorran’s current internal collapse mirrors its political decline. After winning 25 seats in the Kurdistan Parliament in 2009 by confronting KDP-PUK dominance, Gorran gradually shifted into governmental participation, losing its oppositional edge. By 2024, the movement had disintegrated to a single seat, riven by defections, scandals, and internal contradictions.

Further controversy surrounds figures like Dana AbdulKarim, a Gorran minister aligned with the Mustafa faction, who was reportedly gifted a fleet of luxury vehicles by the KRG Prime Minister last year—an emblem of how far Gorran’s revolutionary ethos has eroded under the pressures of political co-optation.

Analysis: The upcoming leadership conference is more than an internal contest for Gorran — it is a struggle over the remnants of a collapsed political project.

The mechanism imposed by the Election Commission — mobilizing the 2,130 registered founding members — offers a rare, orderly method to settle the factional dispute. Yet, viewed in historical context, it is a final arbitration over an organization that has already suffered political self-annihilation.

Gorran’s dramatic rise in 2009 was predicated on its outsider status, its fierce opposition to KDP-PUK domination, and its promise to disrupt a stagnant political order. Its subsequent trajectory — from 25 seats in 2009 to just 1 seat in 2024 — reveals a systematic collapse driven by strategic miscalculations, ideological compromises, and internal decay.

Efforts to reform from within the government after 2013 quickly devolved into co-optation, with Gorran’s ministers becoming enablers rather than challengers of the very structures they once opposed. By 2018, the movement’s ideological retreat was almost complete: once framed as agents of transformative change, Gorran officials largely functioned as passive extensions of the KDP’s political will.

The current split — between a faction tied to Nawshirwan Mustafa’s heirs and another centered around alternative power bases — is less a sign of vibrant internal debate and more a symptom of a movement hollowed out by years of strategic and ethical drift. Both sides now contest the leadership of an organization that commands little popular trust and holds virtually no institutional leverage.

Victory at the conference may hand one faction formal control over Gorran’s skeletal party apparatus and dwindling resources. But it will not automatically restore Gorran’s lost political relevance. The deeper question — whether the movement can be resurrected as a credible force for reform — remains unanswered. Without a radical strategic and ethical re-foundation, Gorran risks becoming little more than a historical footnote: a movement that momentarily promised to change Kurdish politics, only to replicate the very pathologies it was founded to oppose.