Thursday, 15 million Iraqi voters have the chance to participate in their first free parliamentary election. They'll select a new assembly, called the Council of Representatives, that over the next four years will set the course of the new Iraq.

Thursday's election is going to establish the formal balance of political power in Iraq until 2010.

The parliament that sits after this vote will preside over an almost certain decline in America's military presence on the ground and a dramatic increase in Iraq's own responsibilities.

About 93 percent of Iraqis intend to vote Thursday, according to a poll conducted by the US-funded International Republican Institute (IRI) released Thursday. (Interviews for the poll were conducted in all governorates except the mostly Sunni Anbar.) And 61 percent of them say the new government's top priorities should be infrastructure and economic development.

While the temporary government grappled with lame-duck status from practically the moment it was formed at the end of April, the new parliament will be in a position to make political compromises that could help bring peace to Iraq. But if the Shiite bloc, certain to be dominant, maginalizes minority Sunni Arab politicians, the new parliament could add fuel to an already fierce rebellion.

US political influence will also inevitably decline as Iraqi politicians with popular support take their seats in the assembly and begin making decisions with far-reaching consequences about the role of Islam, revising the Constitution, and sectarian power sharing.

More than 6,650 candidates are vying for Iraq's 275 parliamentary seats. Most of them belong to one of 307 political parties and 19 political coalitions (alliances among parties, such as the Shiite Islamist list).

The United Iraqi Alliance (UIA), a coalition of Shiite Islamist political parties, will probably do best. They took 51 percent of the seats in January.

But this time, Iraq's Sunni Arabs, most of whom boycotted the last election, will vote in much greater numbers, inevitably clawing some seats away from the Shiite Islamists and others.

There has also been a great deal of disappointment with the current UIA-led government, which will probably see some of their voters defect to other groups. But simply based on Iraq's demographics and the way seats are apportioned - 47 percent of the seats are up for grabs in the Shiite south and in Baghdad (about 60 percent Shiite) - the UIA should end up with 40 to 50 percent of the new parliament.

The ethnic Kurdish bloc will take somewhere between 13 percent and 20 percent of the seats. The secular- leaning party of former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi took 14 percent of the seats last time and he could do about the same again, though he no longer has the advantage of incumbency.

Former US favorite Ahmad Chalabi is the wild card. He has formed a party with Sherif Ali bin Hussein, a descendant of Iraq's British-appointed monarchs. Mr. Hussein's party took 0.13 percent of the national vote last time.

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